ERE IS CHRIST? 







na.ss 7^rl, I Q.I 

Book. H 7 



WHERE IS CHRIST? 



WHERE IS CHRIST? 

A Question for Christians 



BY 

AN ANGLICAN PRIEST 
IN CHINA 

cr Ha^Ke^, TrcJicfk S+ef^t^e-n ^ 



WITH A FOREWORD 

BY THE 

BISHOP OF EDINBURGH 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1919 






To HIM AND IN HIM 

To Parents who brought us up 

To Liberty and Unity 



-2^//. 






FOREWORD 

WHERE IS CHRIST? 

SOME of the best contributions to Christian thought 
have lately come to us from the Mission Field. 
Such books as Adventure for God and Presence, by the 
Bishop of Phihppine Islands, and The One Christ, by 
the Bishop of Zanzibar, are examples of the depth and 
width of thought which are gained in new lands un- 
fettered by tradition or conventionahsm. And in this 
book for which I have been asked to write a short 
foreword we have another help to our thinking in the 
great question put to us by an Anghcan priest in China. 
After he had won high honours at Oxford and practical 
experience in Oxford House, the author obeyed the 
call that was sounded during the Pan-Anghcan year 
and made the great adventure for God in North China. 
He reached the land of his adoption to find his Hfe 
endangered by the Revolution in 191 1, when his friend 
and coadjutor was killed by his side. Some years' work 
in the country villages, south of Peking, have led him to 
feel the great dangers we are in through our unhappy 
divisions, and in this book he throws out the arresting 
question, " Where is Christ ? " That question he 
feels quite rightly cannot be fully met by saying He is 
in Christians, because Christ must have corporate as ^/ 
well as individual expression. It is just this which is 

5 



/ 

< 



6 FOREWORD 

lacking. We want to know where He is "in relation 
to the Church and to the modern world." To the 
bigoted Roman Cathohc such a question would argue 
the failure of schism. "We know well where Christ is/' 
he would say, '' in His Holy Church, and only there will 
we find Him." But this arrogant assumption has in 
these years of war received a rude shock. Never has 
the Church of Rome seemed weaker in the eyes of 
the world. 

The author, in presenting material which he hopes 
may help towards an answer, feels clearly that Christ's 
Presence cannot involve any Hmitations of time and 
space, and that it must correspond to the ^videst con- 
sciousness of Christian experience. He thinks that 
the Church's failure, manifested by its divisions and 
lack of influence, is " a failure to grow up, a failure to 
keep up with the facts of life. The past has ecHpsed 
the present. Forms and institutions, though neces- 
sary, have exercised an altogether disproportionate 
influence, and Christ present in the Body has not 
been able to express Himself." The question is 
pursued with eager interest and force from chapter 
to chapter, and is set forth with much ability and 
abundance of quotation, with strong reasons not 
only why we should think it out but along what 
lines the answer may be found. Not every one 
will find himself in agreement with all the thoughts 
that are expressed. That is neither possible nor to be 
desired in a question so large and difficult, but our 
gratitude is earned by one who with originality and 
insight attacks the main issues and rightly demands 
that all those in positions of authority and leadership 
should fearlessly face the consequences to which the 
Spirit of Christ may lead them. I heartily commend 



FOREWORD 7 

this courageous study of the question to the con- 
sideration of my fellow Churchmen throughout the 
Anglican Communion — a subject which is of para- 
mount importance to all who feel that things that 
are shaken are being removed in order that those 
things .which cannot be shaken may remain. 

GEORGE, BISHOP OF EDINBURGH. 



PREFACE 

THE New Testament quotations in the following 
chapters are taken sometimes from the Revised 
Version, but more often from The New Testament, a 
New Translation, by Dr. James Moffatt. What we 
all want is not the letter but the spirit. A new trans- 
lation such as that just named seems to make the New 
Testament a new book : at the cost of the familiar 
sounds we gain new access to the original spirit. Now 
this is a notable experience of missionaries in foreign 
lands, especially in such countries as China and Japan 
where the genius of the language is utterly different 
from that of the whole European family. The neces- 
sity of turning your sentences and paragraphs inside 
out in order to present them in Chinese form involves 
the necessity of turning your, thoughts inside out in 
order to find the right presentment to Chinese minds. 
In giving lessons on the Gospels to keen schoolboys 
who have grown up to fourteen or fifteen with no 
knowledge of Christianity, the standpoint and assump- 
tions of ordinary English lesson-books seem provincial, 
conventional. 

The question presented in this book seemed to arise 
out of a class of Chinese schoolmasters studying the 
New Testament for the first time. On furlough in 
England I put it to several friends, and found, for the 
most part, that they, like myself, were not ready with 
an answer. 

9 



10 PREFACE 

We have all been preoccupied. To one viewing 
witH eyes fresh from China English Hfe in home and 
Church in the months just before the war, preoccupa- 
tion seemed a deepening feature. Out of that pre- 
occupation has grown this greater : two years of war, 
and no end in sight — no end of international hatred. 
What have English missionaries now to offer to such 
a great people as the Chinese ? Surely we are not to 
win them over just to our ideas of Christianity. That 
would be an example of the essential devilry of pro- 
selytism. No : the question for them and for us is. 
Where is Christ, in relation to us all ? Where are we, 
in relation to Him ? 

Begun in England in the first few months of the war, 
and continued by degrees in the interior of China, far 
from European conditions and facilities, these few 
chapters are rough and incomplete. There is far more 
to be said, which can be better said by others : and 
perhaps before we say much more we may get at the 
answer to this Question : for on it depends all the 
sequel. 

The writer professes nothing original, nothing 
unique in these pages. It is a sifting of old materials 
rather than a discovery of new that is the urgent need. 
Two writers among many who have lately sifted out 
the same pearl of great price are Bishop Brent in 
Presence, and Dr. A. W. Robinson in Christ and the 
Church : a Re-statement of Belief. 

" A man's religion," said Carlyle, " consists not of 
the many things he is in doubt of, and tries to believe, 
but of the few he is assured of, and has no need of 
effort for believing. His religion, whatever it may be, 
is a discerned fact." 

This book is addressed to fellow-believers ; there- 



PREFACE II 

fore what in it may seem egoistic is but an expression 
of one among many, who all draw life from the same 
Source, and live it each for himself in individual reality. 
It is for the sake of reality that mention is made of 
personal experiences. 

It is addressed to fellow-believers in the living 
Christ, who all know Him as their Lord and their 
God, but see not yet all things subject to Him, even 
within His Church. That there at least He may be 
supreme is the hope in which these pages have been 
written : supreme in His Church first, that thereafter 
the kingdoms of the world may give Him their alle- 
giance. 

Somewhere in China. 
Christmas, 1916. 

War conditions have delayed publication of this 
book, and thus put some of its time references out 
of date. But the position is essentially unchanged ; 
the Church's lack of vision still seems to require 
prescription of the original "eye-salve.'* 

May, 1919. 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE 

I The Need of Answer 

In view of His apparent failure . . .19 

He has not failed us individually . . .19 

Just on that account we want to know where He 
is in relation to the Church and to the modem 
world ....... 20 

The importance of concentrating attention on 
this question . ..... 20 

II The Gospel Answer 

The answer cannot involve any limitation of 

time or space ...... 24 

Observe the importance which He gave to this 

point in His final teaching, preparing the 

disciples for His death and its sequel . . 24 

Such is the bearing of the so-called " eschato- 

logical discourses " . . . . -25 

Recent eschatological controversy is due to 

viewing things spiritual out of focus . . 26 

The key to their meaning lies in the nature of 

Love, operative both in old and new, both 

immanent and transcendent ... 26 

The perpetual and unfailing Presence of Christ 

is the culmination of the Gospel story and the 

Gospel teaching . . . . . .29 

Note on our Lord's Eschatology (St. Matt. xxiv. 

and XXV.) . . . . . . .30 

yi The New Testament Experience 

New experience of Christ reunited the disciples 
after His death ..,,,. 32 

13 



14 CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

III On this experience the Church was founded, and 

into this experience converts were brought . 32 

The goal of human hopes had been reached . 33 

Tradition and the existing order worked against 
the new Life •••••. 33 

The first Church controversies turned on ques- 
tions of the limits of the fellowship of Life, 
and were ended by frank recognition of God's 
present working ..... 34 

New Testament theology reflects the New Testa- 
ment facts of experience : "in Christ " ; " the 
Body of Christ "-.... 35 

Christ is the new Creator of each man, and is 
therefore God . . . . . '36 

The reUgion of loyalty. Professor Royce de- 
scribes the fact, but professes ignorance of its 
cause. Hamack on " the Third Race " . 37 

The New Testament experience of Christ as not 
only sanctifying individuals but as making 
them a new community was prolonged into 
subsequent generations of the Church . 40 

Why is it now regarded as a phenomenon of the 
the past ? . . . . . . .40 

Notes to Chapter III : 

(i) The story of Acts iii. . . . .41 

(2) I and 2 Thessalonians . . . • ^^ 

(3) Eschatological language. ... 42 

IV Absentee Christology 

Lapse of faith in Christ has led to the formulation 
of schemes of theology which treat Him as an 
Absentee ....... 43 

A . Within the Church : 

The Ascension, as implying Christ's de- 
parture ...... 44 

Pentecost, as implying a Substitute for 
Christ 46 

Advent, as impljdng that the Church 
must wait for Christ ... 46 

B. Outside the Church : 

Christ viewed as only a man . . 48 
This idea refuted by the progress of 
criticism. , . , . , 49 



CONTENTS 15 

CHAP. PAGE 

IV Loofs' summary of results of criticism : 

two views discredited — (a) that Christ 
was not a man, but an imaginary- 
deity ; (b) that Christ was only a man 50 
Loofs seeks refuge in semi-divinity . 5 1 
Two reasons for flight from the truth : 

(a) The Church's failure to reveal 

'^ Christ ..... 52 

(b) The moral challenge of the Cross . 52 
The Mischief worked by Absentee Theology : 

{a) In the Church — disunion . . '53 

(b) In society — competition and war . . 53 

(c) In personal life — ^helplessness . . 54 
This mental habit of puttiug Christ away from 

us is contrary to the vital religion of all true 
Christians ....... 54 

V Christ in God 

We believe in Christ as the divine ideal both for 
the individual and for society. Christ is the 
personal meaning of the individual and of 
society ....... 56 

Violence, ignoring and violating personal mean- 
ings, is anti-Christ . . . . .56 

Yet we habitually attribute such violence to God 56 

The idea that things are thus meaningless betrays 
a loss of monotheistic faith : despite the teach- 
ing of modem science, and of poets, and of 
Christ Himself, and of individual experience 57 

Christian faith is a knowledge of what facts mean. 
The meaning of the universe is Christ : Christ 
is the meaning of life, of me, of society : He 
is what we all are for . . . .62 

Belief in Christ involves acceptance of this 
meaning of things, in heart and will . . 62 

Is Christ in fact thus central in all our thought ? 63 

A Christian is at one w4th God, and finds fulness 
of life in the Divine Society ... 64 

Where then is Christ ? Christ is in God, and we 
find Him by giving ourselves up to love . 65 

But misunderstanding God we misunderstand 
man : hence divided Christendom : our double 
failure of love .,.,., 66 



68 



i6 CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

VI Validity of Sectional Experience 

We acknowledge the duty of mutual love, but in 
fact are ranged against one another . . 67 

For all real Christians are sure of the truth of 
their doctrines and the efficacy of their means 
of grace, and conclude that other ways must 
be wrong ....... 67 

The Mission field brings many into new appre- 
ciation of their fellow-Christians : as does the 
war ........ 

We learn that God is not tied to our conceptions 
of His truth and grace . . . .68 

This, however, does not justify disloyalty to our 
own communion ..... 69 

Many hope that foreign missions will lead the 
way to reunion ; but the hope is not backed 
by policy ....... 70 

Acknowledgment of the facts of human life as 
being the acts of God is the only way out of 
our trouble . . . . ... 70 

The need of a theology based on psychology : a 
study of the actual operations of Love : such 
was the earliest Christian theology . . 71 

Von Hiigel's psychological analysis of religion 
into three elements, the institutional, the 
rational and the mystical .... 74 

He shows that every man's denominational in- 
heritance is inalienable . . . .76 

Mutual recognition of all denominations is there- 
fore a necessary acknowledgment of God . 77 

Growing evidence of this acknowledgment. 
The World Conference on Faith and Order. 78 
The Constructive Quarterly . . -7^ 

A Roman Catholic acknowledgment . . 79 

A Congregationalist acknowledgment . . 80 

The Student Christian Movement . . .81 

But the Church remains powerless to move into 

this larger faith in Christ present with us all 81 



VII The Way 

We have found the Way for ourselves, but not 

for Society ...... 82 



CONTENTS 17 

CHAP. PAGE 

VII Human Society has lost its way because the 
Church has lost the way and therefore cannot 
lead ........ 82 

The Church's failure is a failure to grow up ; an 
arrest of growth ; a failure to keep up with 
the facts of life. The Past has eclipsed the 
Present ....... 83 

Corporate religion, like individual religion, may 
be analysed into three essential elements : 
institutional, rational, mystical. Christendom 
at present is held up at the first two stages, 
over- emphasizing either the institutional or 
the rational element of religion ... 84 
The result is adult Christians in a stunted 
Christendom — the deepest tragedy of the pre- 
sent war. The religion of loyalty has produced 
loyal men ; but the ultimate meaning of 
loyalty has not been manifested by the Church, 
because she has not made the presence of 
Christ the dominant factor of religion : the 
institutional has been severed from the mys- 
tical ....... 87 

This failure of Christendom is a failure of faith 
in Christ as God, a failure to see that He is Love 
and Love is He. . . . . .90 

The Anglican Communion seems to a peculiar 

degree dominated by institutional ideas . 91 
Responsibility for the failure of Christendom 
lies with all who hold authority in the Church. 
The unfairness of our ministry. We too are 
caUed to self-surrender to the living Christ. 
We must surrender our self-important notions 
of responsibility. The root facts of human 
life are in Christ's hands, not in ours . . 91 

Not that forms and institutions are to be dis- 
carded, but they are to be held in entire sub- 
ordination to the present Christ. Compare 
the Encyclical Letter of the Lambeth Con- 
ference of 1908. We have the vision, but not 
yet the practice. . . . . .95 

The great usurpation of Christ's sovereignty con- 
tinues until we give ourselves up to Love, by 
personal repentance ..... 98 

Then Christ can work, i.e. work through us, for 

B 



i8 CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

VII He is working already, {a) Call to witness all 
who have taken part in the Pan-Anglican, 
Edinburgh, Swanwick, or other such Con- 
ferences ; and especially the Fellowships of 
Silence, {b) Call to witness also recent ten- 
dencies in the pohtical field, and in the British 
Empire. I.e. Christ is at work, and not only 
"here" or "there" 98 

We have to bring the Church into line with the 
great world forces which are the mighty work- 
ing of God ; and to bring these forces into the 
Church ....... 102 

The Church will then be aUve as the Body of 
Christ ; cathoHc because local ; manifesting 
infinite variety within its unity ; sensitive to 
all claims of personality ; in union with the 
departed ....... 103 

The voices of the prophets call to us priests. It 
is the Way of obedience here and now for each 
of us. It is the Call to the Marriage Supper 
of the Lamb ...... 108 

Postscript — "What shall I do. Lord ? " . . .112 



Where is Christ ? 

A QUESTION FOR CHRISTIANS 

CHAPTER I 

THE NEED OF ANSWER 

THE apparent failure of Christ hardly needs 
dwelling on. Christian Europe is at war, and 
everything that Christ came to save us from is going on 
before our eyes. The tragedy of Christian disappoint- 
ment lies on all our hearts. And the failure of Chris- 
tianity has been spelt, not only by this present war, 
but by all the social and industrial problems growing 
in complexity and virulence from year to year and 
from generation to generation. Moreover, the child 
of the Church brought up in happy faith in Jesus 
finds in adult years that the Church of his baptism 
has no clear voice to utter in face of modern per- 
plexities, presents no united front to modem evils. 
It is probably true to say of most members of the 
Church to-day that the present position of the Church 
in no sense answers to their convictions. 

Yet there is no waning of our faith in Christ. To 
us as individuals He is no less the real Saviour than He 
was to men of old. Every missionary, every mis- 

19 



20 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

sioner, knows that His power fails not. To soldiers 
on the field of battle He is what He has ever been to 
those who lay down their hves for the brethren. 

Thus the apparent failure of Christianity is not 
in individual hves, but rather in the w^orld at large 
and in the Church as a whole. It is the beheving 
Christian that is in trouble about Christ ; the man who 
has found Christ now yearns to find Him in the new 
conditions of society. The question, " WTiere is 
Christ ? " is asked by us who know Him. 

At least it surely must be asked if we are to keep 
things in proportion. For if we are assured of the 
presence of Christ we need not be much troubled 
about any other question in religion. And yet re- 
Hgious controversy and theological discussion seem to 
revolve around a multiplicity of topics other than 
this, so that the minds of Christians are apt to be 
diverted from this central point. The Kikuyu con- 
troversy affords a striking illustration of this. One 
of the Bishops who took part in the imited Communion 
Service, in the subsequent account of the proceedings 
concluded with the statement that one thing at least 
was certain, that the Master Himself blessed the 
occasion with His Presence. Now surely it is note- 
worthy that in all the controversy that has taken place 
about what was then done, while many points of doc- 
trine and Church order have been debated, no atten- 
tion whatever seems to have been directed to the ques- 
tion whether this statement that Christ Himself was 
present was true to fact or not. It might seem that 
if it be true, then there can be no further question or 
dispute as to the rightness of what took place ; and 
on the other hand if it be untrue, such a glaring mis- 
statement on the only question that mattered ought 



THE NEED OF ANSWER 21 

to be capable of some kind of refutation. We surely ( 
have not got to the point that everything matters 
except whether Christ is with us or not. To every 
one of us Christians it is the one thing that does matter, 
and it is the one thing that matters to the Church. 
So Father Kelly in The Church and Religious Unity, / 
explaining why Catholics prize the Sacraments, says : 
" The position which I am trying to explain can all be 
expressed in the words *T want Christ,' and I mean 
that in just the sense of the child crying in the night 
* I want mother.' " No substitute will do. " Lord, 
to whom shall we go ? '' ** In Thy presence is the 
fulness of joy." 

We all "want Christ." We want to know where 
He is in this modern world of ours. For in our hearts 
we are sure that if we knew the answer to that ques- 
tion we could all go forward as one body to claim the 
world for Him with no less confident enthusiasm, but 
with far greater resources at our disposal, than were 
possessed by those first Christians, to whom the answer 
to the question was not in doubt. Are there not 
enough Christians in almost any town in Europe to 
sweep it clean of organized iniquity, if only they were 
united in Christ's service ? Even in this vast heathen 
land of China the number of Chinese communicants 
outside the Roman and Greek Missions has grown 
from 177,000 in 1907 to 270,000 in 1916. What 
might we not do if we were wholly united ? What 
might not He do through us ? 

The Bampton Lectures by Peile on The Reproach 
of the Gospel, and by Hobhouse on The Church and the 
World in Idea and in History, voiced our Christian 
dissatisfaction with both Church and World as they 
are to-day. But do we not now want less pathos 



22 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

and more confidence in our tone ? That our Lord 
bravely facing the initial facts of His tremendous 
enterprise frankly acknowledged that the way was 
narrow and very few were finding it, is no ground now 
that after His tremendous victories in every land we 
should harbour any doubt of His ultimate victory 
over all His enemies, or of His power to accomplish 
His purpose of saving the whole world. 

But to that end we want, He wants, a different 
Church from that which is now in evidence. We need 
to get rid of this outrageous contrast between indivi- 
\\dual faith and the corporate expression of it. If He 
is my God, He must be the world's God ; if He is my 
Lord in personal communion. He must be the Church's 
Lord in immediate personal control. If I know where 
He is for me, I must know where He is for society. 

Hence, the question of this book. This contrast 
\ between personal faith and social expression of it 
wiU pursue us from chapter to chapter. We shall see 
(chap. II) that the purpose of Christ was to abolish 
the contrast between rehgious authority and individual 
religion by the fact of His Presence ; and that the 
early Church (chap. Ill) by faith in this Presence 
resisted the tendency to this contrast, enlarging its 
formularies and its boundaries to correspond with 
the ascertained facts of personal experience ; for, 
being " ahve unto God," it was ahve to facts. But we 
have to acknowledge (chap. IV) that theology has 
since obscured this fundamental characteristic of 
Christianity by losing touch with the present Christ. 
And therefore we still too often fail to understand 
God (chap. V) or man (chap. VI). But, thank God, 
the way in which the first Christains walked is still 
open to us (chap. VII). Heaven lies about us, not 



THE NEED OF ANSWER 23 

only in our infancy. That each of us who have any 
part or lot in Church Government may realize our 
responsibilitj/ for the hell on earth that might be ^ 
heaven is the repentant hope of the writer of these 
pages. Is it not for this that the National Mission 
has come upon us ? 



CHAPTER II ; 

THE GOSPEL ANSWER 

WHERE is Christ ? " It is immediately 
obvious that we cannot deal with this 
question Hterally as implying spatial limitation. " If 
any man shall say unto you, ' Lo, here is Christ,' or 
' there,' believe it not." As Christians we all realize 
that the presence and working of Christ is not limited 
by any material obstacle. When we speak of the 
presence or absence of Christ, therefore, we are thinking 
not of material but of spiritual conditions, conditions 
which transcend time and space. 

Obvious as this point is, however, it seems well to 
study afresh the attention which our Lord directed 
to it during the closing hours of His earthly life. 

What was needed during those few days which take 
such a large place in the Gospel narratives ? The 
need He saw was to prepare His disciples for His 
death. That death was to be no dramatic perform- 
ance ; it was to be the grim reality of the real death 
that ends the familiar modes of intercourse and makes 
the great change in the personal relationship of those 
who love. More particularly for Him and for them it 
meant the change in the meaning of His Lordship. 
No longer would He be among them in the guise of 
the local and temporal Messiah of the Jews : He was 
to be the universal and eternal Saviour. 

24 



THE GOSPEL ANSWER 25 

This new faith was taught mainly by the act— by 
the death He died. But since the lesson of death is 
more often misread by us men than any other lesson 
we have to learn, our Lord set Himself to help the dis- 
ciples by interpreting beforehand the meaning of the 
coming change, " that their hearts might not be 
troubled," " that His joy might be within them and 
their joy complete." '' He had loved His own in this 
world, and He loved them to the end." This teaching, 
of such primary importance to all the first Christians 
who experienced the transition from the local national 
faith to the cathohc faith, naturally takes a prominent 
place in each of the Gospels, in the first three no less 
than in the fourth Gospel. For this surely is the 
purpose of the so-called eschatological discourses in 
St. Mark xiii. and the parallel passages. These eschato- 
logical passages have in recent years been largely 
ignored or discounted by '' Hberal" theologians. 
Their attention has been focussed on the ethical and 
social teachings of Jesus, which enable them to repre- 
sent Him as the initiator of those ideals of social 
reform on which their hearts are set. Beheving in 
the steady progress of the race by means of social 
amehoration and reform, towards the removal of all 
human ills, they hke to see in Jesus the exponent of 
such sane principles ; and they have therefore tended 
to slur over those parts of the Gospels which seem 
to repesent Him as foretelHng cataclysmal changes 
independent of human effort. Such writers are apt 
to be uncertain or even negative on the subject of 
Christ's Divinity. 1 But the tendency to minimize 
one part of the evidence has now brought its natural 
reaction, and we have writers who repudiate the picture 
1 See below, chap. IV. 



26 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

of Jesus as a liberal reformer of the modern type, 
and insist that He carried on the Jewish line of belief 
in a coming Day of the Lord when the Kingdom of 
God should be established by a catastrophic inter- 
vention from Heaven. 

Does not this controversy, like others in the history 
of theological thought, afford evidence that we are 
viewing the things of the spiritual order out of focus ? 
What is the discussion ? Is salvation by evolution 
or by catastrophe ? By human growth or by Divine 
intervention ? How did our Lord view it ? What 
did He look forward to ? Note that this question 
concerns not merely a few selected passages in the 
Gospels, but the meaning of all Christ came to do 
and did. It concerns His revelation of God. If 
then we are to understand His point of view in the 
matter, the first essential is to recover and hold to 
more of His thought of God — ^the simple but all- 
embracing thought that God is Love. How does 
Love order the world ? How does Love order His- 
tory ? How^ does Love order life for each of us ? 
Love holds on, lets nothing go, makes the best of 
everything, is true to all the past. Yet Love is always 
new, new in devices, new in surprises, new in each new 
experience through which the loved ones are brought. 

The experience of all lovers is a revelation of God ; 
and few words are as good as many in the endeavour 
to express it. The fact of that Love as the ground of 
the Universe is the basis of all philosophical specula- 
tions about the One and the Many, time and eternity, 
unity in diversity ; and is evidenced by modern dis- 
coveries of evolutionary law, showing how present 
life is built up out of the past. We might take as 
illustrations the facts of recapitulation in embryology, 



THE GOSPEL ANSWER 27 

or the modern science of heredity, based on the fact 
that " like tends to produce Uke/' and that yet " no 
two creatures are ever exactly alike." ^ Other and 
higher illustrations are suggested by the Historical 
Method as applied to all departments of human life 
and thought. " No age can hope to understand its 
own mind and temper, its purpose and ideals, except 
through a study of the past from which it has sprung." ^ 
The basal facts of life are the operations of Love, 
which always uses the old, yet is always bringing to 
light new possibilities of growth and progress. 

How then does Love work in human history ? By 
evolution or by catastrophe ? by human growth or 
by Divine intervention ? From this modern view- 
point, which takes in all times and all peoples, we can 
see that God is operative in and through both — the 
growth and the catastrophe. Men living on the 
level stretches of history when all seems man-made 
tend to lose thought of God : and again, in the terror 
and the darkness, when the old land-marks are blotted 
from sight, and homes and kingdoms are broken up, 
men tend to despair of God. But we, from the modern 
point of view, can trace the Hand of God through all, 
in the changeless principles and laws of His working ; 
we know both His immanence in the world, and His 
transcendence of its circumstances. The modern 
scientific view, just as far as it is loyalty accepted, 
frees us from the prejudice of local relationships, and 
the narrow-mindedness of temporary conditions, and 
brings us out into the broad spaces of the peace and 
wisdom of God. 

1 See, e.g., Heredity, by J. A. S. Watson ("The People's 
Books," Jack, 6^.). 

2 Storr, Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth 
Century. 



28 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

Now we Christians are aware that this free outlook 
on life is our insight into God, as Jesus revealed Him. 
We come back then to the point that this view of God 
is what our Lord sought to give to His disciples and 
to the world. 

How then did He behave to the local and temporary 
thoughts and feeUngs of His day and nation ? First, 
He was conspicuously loyal to them ; loyal to the 
traditional hope, passionate in His devotion to Jeru- 
salem. But also, and still more conspicuously. He 
taught the new fulfilment of that old hope, the new 
way of self-oblation to that old ideal. For His life 
was the Hfe of God, and His teaching the truth of God. 
" My Father worketh hitherto and I work." Life 
and teaching made known the hving God, the Father, 
with Whom the very hairs on j^our head are all num- 
bered. 

So in His last hours we see Him concerned to secure 
this behef to His followers, through all that might 
obscure it : through His own death ; through the 
fall of Jerusalem ; through all future persecutions, 
wars or troubles of any kind. And belief in that 
love of God means belief in Him present with them 
still, despite the impending change of relationship 
brought about by His Death. The old fellowship is 
to be continued and deepened under the new con- 
ditions. 

It is then disastrous to proper understanding of the 
Gospel to regard our Lord at St. Mark xiii. as abruptly 
forsaking His habitual attention to present spiritual 
needs and taking up the role of Lecturer on Apocalyptic. 
The concentration of attention on external circum- 
stances is precise^ the common human error from 
which He is seeking to deliver them ; the error of 



THE GOSPEL ANSWER 29 

splitting experience up into sections, and making 
bogies of these lumps of misunderstood facts. His 
thought is not so much of distant events, of time and 
space, as of the spiritual experience of His loved ones 
in the trials and persecutions that He knew must lie 
before them, in the near future. And so by familiar 
parable of the clouds He tells them of that Presence 
which eye cannot penetrate and which is not limited 
by material hindrances of earthly distance. To the 
lonely martyr on distant lands no earthly friend can 
journey to the rescue, but Christ will come to him in 
ways beyond his knowing. Yea; from the four winds, 
from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost 
part of heaven will He gather His elect. The same 
truth is impressed by that other striking metaphor of 
the carcase and the vultures : no matter how solitary 
the spot in which the dead body falls, soon and with- 
out fail there gather to it out of the unseen the 
ministers of God's will : even so Christ will find His 
faithful. " Go and make disciples of all nations. I 
will be with you all the time, to the very end of the 
world." 

Thus interpreted the Synoptic Gospels are at one 
with St. John's Gospel in representing our Lord's 
mind during those last hours as almost wholly given 
to the preparation of His disciples for that change in 
relationship which was to mean to them not separation 
but a new and universal mode of Presence. " I will 
not leave you forlorn ; I am coming to you. A little 
while longer and the world will see me no more, but 
you will see me, because I am living and you will be 
living too. You will understand, on that day, that 
I am in My Father and you are in Me and I am in 
you. ... If any one loves Me he will obey My word. 



30 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

and My Father will love him and we will come to him 
and take up Our abode with him." ^ 

The universaHty of Christ's Presence, then, is what 
the Gospels make both the culmination of their story 
and the climax of His teaching. *' One greater than 
the temple is here." " Neither in this mountain 
nor yet in Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father." 
" Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in 
My Name, there am I in the midst of them." For 
words like these the Jews killed Him. He was sub- 
versive of their religious position. 

Can it be that we with our particularist claims — we 
Catholics who think that others are outside His cathohc 
body, we Evangehcals who think that others have 
missed the blessings of the Gospel — can it be that we 
have all been doing what the Jews did, and in effect 
crucifying the Son of God afresh and putting Him to 
an open shame ? Does not every particularist claim 
to the Christ constitute the essential refusal of Him, 
the fundamental denial of His Godhead? 



NOTE TO CHAPTER II 

OUR LORD'S " ESCHATOLOGY " 

Since the above mode of interpretation of the eschato- 
logical teaching of the Gospels may suggest questions to 
some minds used to interpreting these passages otherwise, 
I venture to add here a suggested analysis of the teaching 
of St. Matthew xxiv. 

1. Do not be misled by any man claiming to be the 
Christ (vers. 4-5). 

2. Do not regard external troubles as the end : they 
will come, trouble on trouble : but the Gospel of the 

1 St. John xiv. 18-23. 



THE GOSPEL ANSWER 31 

Kingdom is the appointed end for all the world (vers. 
6-14). 

3. The fall of Jerusalem is inevitable ; but God cares 
for you through all that is to come (vers. 15-22). 

4. Do not think you have to run after any Christ : 
Christ will find each of you surely enough (vers. 23-28). 

5. Earth's days of misery wfll always lead direct to 
heavenly succour. In however remote a spot they suffer, 
Christ will rescue His elect (vers. 29-31). 

6. Always take troubles as indicating His nearness 
(vers. 32-33). 

7. This will be found true in the experience of this 
generation; and is an eternal truth, not transient (vers. 

34-35)- 

8. No one can determine beforehand the time of Christ's 
arrival ; it is the crisis of each individual life, coming un- 
perceived, unexpected, in the midst of preoccupations 
or indifference. Be always ready (vers. 36-51). 

St. Matthew xxv. — The universal import of the three 
parables in this chapter has been expounded by many a 
preacher. Here, therefore, I would only note two points 
as following up the thought of the previous chapter : 
(i) Our Lord is dealing with imiversal principles of the moral 
life. Cf. verse 29, " To every one who has shall more be 
given and richly given : but from him who has nothing, 
even what he has shall be taken." (2) The personal con- 
cern of God and of Christ with the details of every man's 
life. 



"If we would be loyal to His teaching, we shall not 
allow the bright prospect of His second coming to blind 
our eyes to the reality of His presence with us all the days ; 
nor shall we strain our ears so eagerly to catch the soimd 
of the arch-angel's trump, that we fail to hear the call 
which comes to us day by day on earth : ' Follow Thou 
Me.' " (Conclusion of Primitive Christian Eschatology, 
by E.X. Dewick, Cambridge University Press, 1912.) 



CHAPTER III 

THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 

CHRISTIANITY is nothing if it is not an 
experience. The Bible is nothing if it is not 
an expression of men's real experience of God ; . and 
the New Testament is nothing if it is not the record and 
interpretation of men's actual experience of Christ. 
That experience was precisely what we have just noted 
as promised by Him in the Gospels. It was new 
experience of Christ that brought the disciples together 
again after His Death. It was in the new unity of 
behef in Him ahve through death that they became 
imbued with power from on high to go out and claim 
the world for Him. They proceeded to gather into 
one fellowship all who accepted their declaration of 
the present power of the living Christ : *' about three 
thousand souls were brought in that day " (Acts ii. 
41). " Brought in " to what ? Into a life of such 
unity that all kept together, and none were suffered 
to go in want, and the root instincts and habits of self 
were transformed ; and into a hfe of such power that 
sickness and disease gave way before their victorious 
advance (Acts ii. 42-47). " You killed the Pioneer 
of Life. But God raised Him from the dead, as we 
can bear witness. He it is who has given strength to 
this man " (Acts iii. 15-16). 

32 



THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 33 

" Go and tell the people all about this Life " was the 
Divine commission to the Apostles that made them 
bold to obey God rather than men (Acts v. 20-29). 

This experience of life, new life, is the basis of the 
New Testament : a new Ufe which men could see being 
lived and expressed in all the manifestations of the 
unity of the Church ; and into the secret of its source 
they were admitted by the Christians' preaching of 
Christ. Seeing the Hfe, men by faith accepted the 
announcement of its unseen Giver, and being thereon 
admitted into the fellowship, themselves experienced 
its power. Such in brief is the history of the early 
chapters of the Acts. 

This experience of the living Christ brought convic- 
tion that the goal of human hopes had been reached 
by that generation. On that conviction the Church 
was founded. That is the meaning of all those claims 
to the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. These 
are " the last days " predicted by the prophet Joel 
(Acts ii. 16-17). The old ideals were now being 
realized. So we read in these chapters how the fellow- 
ship grew, the fellowship of men with Christ and with 
one another — the one Life in its two aspects. ^ 

But it was very hard to keep to it. Worse than 
external persecutions were all the inner influences that 
were against them from tradition and the existing 
social and religious order. A familiar instance of this 
difficulty is Peter at Antioch (Gal. iii. 11-14). So the 
earhest controversies of the Church arose out of this 
new hfe encountering the obstacles of the old, the all- 
embracing spirit of fellowship opposed by traditional 
exclusiveness. What were to be the limits of this 
fellow^ship of Ufe, this Hfe of fellowship ? Who might 

1 See below, p. 41, further note on the stcry of Acts iii. 

C 



34 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

be admitted, or regarded as true members ? Debate 
was ended in each case by recognition of the facts of 
God's working. " \Vhat God has cleansed, you must 
not regard as common." ^ "If God has given 
them exactly the same gift as He gave us when we 
beheved in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I — how 
could I try — to thwart God ? On hearing this they 
desisted and glorified God, saying, ' So God has actu- 
ally allowed the Gentiles to repent and live.' " - "So 
the whole meeting was quieted and listened to Barnabas 
and Paul, recounting the signs and wonders God had 
performed by them among the Gentiles." ^ So the 
Church learned that fellowship was to be hmited by 
no Divinely-given privileges from the past. The 
present working of Christ transcended all tradition. 
The Church accordingly advanced along the lines of 
God's working. In early days it was indeed known 
as " the Way.'* 

Behind New Testament theology lies this New 
Testament experience of facts — facts respected as 
the acts of God. It is therefore as interpreting the 
experience that the theology is to be understood.* 
The worship of Christ as God means that man felt 
His creative love constraining them, knew His creative 
power transforming them, became new men in all the 
relationships of Hfe and in their inmost being. ^ It 
was men whose whole religion was love that could 
enunciate and hold the doctrine that God is Love. 
It was men of a fellowship, all governed by one spirit, 
that learnt to recognize and adore the Holy Spirit 

1 Acts X. 15. 

2 Acts xi. 17, 18. 

3 Acts XV. 12. 

* Cf. Walpole, Vital Religion, chap. xiii. and passim. 
^ 2 Cor. V. 17 ; Gal. vi. 15, 



THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 35 

operative in them all. The revelation of the Trinity 
came to them by degrees in the facts of their life. 
Their Christ ology was their verdict on experience. 
The conditions of Church life enabled the Apostle to 
say : " He, Christ, is the Head, and under Him, as 
the entire Body is welded together and compacted 
by every joint with which it is supplied, the due 
activity of each part enables the Body to grow and 
build itself up in Love." ^ 

A profitable line of study of the New Testament is 
to read through the several books with a view to 
noting all that they say on the one topic of Christ's 
relation to men. For most of us it will bring into a 
new and startling prominence the view of Christ which 
we may perhaps best express by the metaphor of the 
atmosphere in which and by which we live. " In 
Christ," " in the Lord," is the familiar form of St. 
Paul's most frequent thought of Him. This is the 
glorious tonic atmosphere of Church life in each locality, 
the all-pervading, all-embracing atmosphere of the 
Church universal. It is to St. Paul the essential 
meaning of the Christian's status : " the saints in 
Christ Jesus " ; " the faithful in Christ Jesus " ; 
" one man in Christ Jesus " ; *' called in the Lord " ; 
" sons of God in Christ Jesus " ; ''in Christ Jesus I 
begat you " ; " are ye not my work in the Lord ? " ; 
" blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ." 
These terms mean that the Christian fellowship was 
known to be a fellowship with Christ. No : that mode 
of expression is and was inadequate : for Christ was 
not merely the fellow of each, at their side, but above 
and around them all. The Spirit of the community, 
which possessed each of them, was recognized as Christ's 

1 Eph. iv. 15, 16. 



36 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

Spirit, creative in them of the Hfe of fellowship, the 
fresh spring of spiritual wisdom. They had experi- 
ence of arrival at a new plane of consciousness, in 
which life is new, at peace with God and man, free 
from conventional trammels, filled with sense of 
triumph. The essence of Christian status was not 
individual conversion by individual Apostle, but entry 
into the all-pervading life of Christ. " There is a 
new creation whenever a man comes to be in Christ ; 
what is old is gone, the new has come. It is all the 
doing of the God ^Vho has reconciled me to Himself 
through Christ and has permitted me to be a minister 
of His reconciliation. For in Christ God reconciled 
the world to Himself instead of counting men's tres- 
passes against them ; and He entrusted me with the 
message of His reconcihation." ^ " You have had a 
taste of the kindness of the Lord ; come to Him then 
— come to that li\dng Stone which men have rejected 
and God holds choice and precious, come, and, like 
living stones yourselves, be built into a spiritual 
house." '^ '' You are the elect race, the royal priest- 
hood, the consecrated nation, the people who belong 
to Him, that j^ou may proclaim the wondrous deeds 
of Him \^Tio has called you from darkness to His 
wonderful hght — j^ou who were once no people and 
now are God's people, you who were once unpitied 
and now are pitied." ^ 

This thrilling experience of fellowship produces also 
the Pauhne metaphor of the Church as the Body of 
Christ. " As the human body is one and has many 
members, all the members of the body forming one 
body for all their number, so is it with Christ." * 

1 2 Cor. V. 17-19. ^ I Pet. ii. 3-5. ^ i Pet. ii. 9, 10, 
4 I Cor. xii. 12. Eph. iv. 1-16, 



THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 37 

Presence in Christ and belonging to one another are 
two sides of one fact. Christ is thus new Creator of 
each man, and stands to him in the absolute and 
ultimate relationship of God. In thus constituting 
the final unity of humanity. He is seen as the Final 
Cause, and so too as the Efficient Cause, of the universe 
(Col. i. 14-23). Everything was started for this and 
is working towards this. So the New Testament 
rings with the note of loyalty — loyalty based on experi- 
ence and leading each loyal member on to ever new 
experiences, such as only the loyal can know. * ' Loyal, 
we say ; and in this our day of Christian dissension 
men ask, " Loyal to Christ ? " or " Loyal to Church ? " 
But in those first days such question could not be. 
Men who knew where Christ is could not distinguish 
between loyalty to Christ and loyalty to the community 
that lived by His Life, knowing " that open secret 
which, though concealed from ages and generations 
of old, has now been disclosed to the saints of God. 
It is His Will that they should understand the glorious 
wealth which this secret holds for the Gentiles, in the 
fact of Christ's presence among you as your hope of 
glory " (Col. i. 26, 27). In his recent work, Th& 
Problem oj Christianity,'^ Professor Royce finely works 
out the conception of Christianity as the ReUgion of 
Loyalty, and says : "As to the central doctrine of 
the Person of Christ, it was inseparable, in the mind 
of the Pauline Christian, from the doctrine of the 
living Divine Spirit present in the Chmxh." " The 
exalted and Divine Christ was explicitly known and 
interpreted by Paul as the very life of the Church 
itself. And His appearance on earth had its redemp- 

1 The Problem of Christianity. Josiah Royce, Professor of 
History of Philosophy at Harvard. 2 vols. Macm., 191 3. 



38 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

live meaning through its power as the work of the 
Founder of the beloved community." ^ " The Church 
was for Paul the very presence of his Lord." ^ But 
Professor Royce affords a notable example ,of the 
tragedy of so much of the best modern thought, which 
beautifully exhibits Christian principles, but professes 
ignorance of the Christ from Whom they proceed. 
Speaking of the origin of the Christian community he 
says : " Personally I shall nevef hope, in my present 
existence, to know anything whatever about that 
origin, beyond the merest commonplaces. The his- 
torical evidence at hand is insufficient to tell us how 
the Church originated."^ So far removed is his 
actual experience of Christian loyalty from that of 
the early Christian community in which the religion 
of loyalty originated, and in which there was no doubt 
whatever as to how it originated. 

Harnack, in his Mission and Expansion of Chris- 
tianity, is able to find rather more definite information 
in the historical evidence. Cf. e.g. the following 
passage (vol. i., p. 103, Eng. tr.) : " 'Surely He hath 
borne our sickness and carried our sorrows : by His 
stripes we are healed.' This was the new truth that 
issued from the Cross of Jesus. It flowed out hke a 
stream of fresh water, on the arid souls of men and on 
their dry morahty. The morality of outward acts and 
regulations gave way to the conception of a hfe which 
was personal, pure and divine, which spent itself in the 
service of the brethren, and gave itself up ungrudg- 
ingly to death. This conception was the new principle 
of life. It uprooted the old hfe swaying to and 

^ The Problem of Christianity, vol. ii., pp. 359, 360. 

2 Idem, vol. i., p. 104. 

3 Ibid., Preface, p. 28. 



THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 39 

fro between sin and virtue ; it also planted a new life 
whose aim was nothing short of being a disciple of 
Christ, and whose strength was drawn from the life 
of Christ Himself. The disciples went forth to preach 
the tidings of ' God the Saviour/ of that Saviour and 
Physician Whose person, deeds and sufferings were 
man's salvation. Paul was giving vent to no sudden 
or extravagant emotion, but expressing with quiet 
confidence what he was fully conscious of at every 
moment, when he wrote to the Galatians (chap. ii. 
ver. 20), ' I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. 
For the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in 
the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for 
me.' Conscious of this, the primitive Christian mis- 
sionaries were ready to die daily. And that was just 
the reasom why their cause did not collapse." Har- 
nack goes on to show how the vitality of this faith 
caused the Christians to be differentiated, both by 
themselves and by the Greeks and Romans, as " the 
New People " and " the Third Race." " The inner 
energy of the new religion comes out in its self-chosen 
title of ' the New People ' or * the Third Race '^ just 
as plainly as in the testimony extorted from its oppo- 
nents, that in Christianity a new genus of religion had 
actually emerged side by side with the religions of the 
nations and of Judaism. It does not afford much 

1 " The Greeks, Romans, and all other nations had passed 
for the first race {genus primum), in so far as they mutually 
recognized each other's gods or honoured foreign gods as well 
as their own, and had sacrifices and images. The Jews (with 
their national God, their exclusiveness, and a worship which 
lacked images but included sacrifice) constituted the second 
race {genus alterum) . The Christians again (with their spiritual 
God, their lack of images and sacrifices and the contempt 
for the gods — which they shared with the Jews — ) formed the 
third race {genus tertium) " (p . 273). 



40 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

direct evidence upon the outward spread and strength 
of Christianity, for the former estimate emerged, 
asserted itself, and was recognized at an early period, 
when Christians were stiU, in point of numbers, a 
comparatively small society. But it must have been 
of the highest importance for the propaganda of the 
Christian rehgion to be so distinctly differentiated from 
all other reHgions, and to have so lofty a consciousness 
of its own position put before the world. Naturally 
this had a repeUing influence as well upon certain 
circles. Still it was a token of power, and power 
never fails to succeed " (pp. 277-8). 

The New Testament experience of Christ was thus 
prolonged into subsequent generations of the Church : 
experience of Christ not merely as sanctifying and 
empowering individuals, but as making out of indivi- 
duals a new community. The experience of Christ 
was still the experience of being " in Christ," of find- 
ing one's real self not in isolation but in membership 
of a corporate Personality. Christ hved in the Church ; 
the Church Hved in Him. 

Harnack, like many others, in giving us the facts of 
early Christianity, gives them as phenomena of the 
past. He finds them not in the Christian experience 
of to-day, but in the monuments of days gone by. 
The revelation of the eternal God has come to be 
regarded as a bygone event. Can we wonder at this 
failure of modern thought when we consider what a 
mess we Christians have made of our religion ? 



THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE" 41 

Notes to Chapter III 
NEW TESTAMENT ESCHATOLOGY 

(i) The Story of Acts hi. — The main matter of St. 
Peter's speech is the present situation, not the future. 
Accounting for the healing of the man lame from birth, he 
first shows that in Chiist's death and resurrection the God 
of their Fathers has fulfilled what He had announced 
beforehand by the lips of all the prophets (Acts iii. 12-18) ; 
and then urges the people individually to realize that there 
is nothing more to wait for. " Repent then, and turn, and 
have your sins blotted out, so that a breathing space may 
be vouchsafed you, and that the Lord may send Jesus 
your long-decreed Christ, Who must be kept in Heaven 
till the great Restoration " (vers. 19-21). When ? Now : 
for these are the days that have been announced by all 
the prophets (ver. 24) ; '* You are the sons of the prophets 
and of the covenant " (ver. 25) ; the prophet whom Moses 
said " God will raise up '' has been raised up for you (vers. 
22, 26) ; the long-decreed Christ whom you have hoped 
God will send, has been sent " to bless you, by turning 
each of you from your wicked ways " (vers. 20, 26). The 
evidence of Christ's presence afforded by the healed cripple 
is used to convince them of His presence to receive each 
of them (ver. 16) ; only by listening to Him can they know 
what life is (ver. 23). The speech was interrupted, and its 
immediate result on the hearers is not stated, but we can 
hardly be far wrong if we suppose that, for some of them 
at least, the case was as later at Caesarea, " while Peter 
was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who listened 
to what he said " (Acts x. 44). In such coming of that 
other Comforter Christ Himself came (St. John xiv. 16-18). 

(2) I and 2 Thessalonians. — The Epistles to the Thes- 
salonians are often treated as a mine of eschatological 
doctrine. But their main concern is not the mysterious 
future, but the real present. St. Paul is addressing a new 
little community of Christians situated in the midst of 
corrupt human society. We may distinguish three leading 
ideas in his exhortation : — 

[a) We have the glorious prospect of Christ's triunph, 



42 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

however dark things seem at present ; we all look for that 
final issue. 

(b) But for us who know Christ, that Day of the Lord 
is not a future unrelated to the present. We are already 
in the Daylight. That Day, therefore, is for us not merely 
a Future to be waited for ; it is a Present to be conformed 
to (of. I Thess. V. i-ii). 

(c) This realization does not mean acquiescence in things 
as they are. The battle against sin has to be fought out 
(cf. 2 Thess. ii.). 

The Church of the Thessalonians, while looking forward 
to Christ, is already in Christ. The position is that which 
St. Paul elsewhere describes as his own : "to me to live 
is Christ, and to die is gain." 

(3) EscHATOLOGiCAL LANGUAGE. — Modern scholars have 
made us aware of the abundance of Apocalyptic literature 
in New Testament times . "It was inevitable that the 
Jewish-Christian Church should think of the future in 
terms of Jewish Apocalyptic. The language and details of its 
imagery are to be found up and down the Epistles." ^ 

We are therefore unlikely to arrive at a right inter- 
pretation of such language in the New Testament unless 
we remember {a) that our Lord was bound to use the 
current terms, but in using them would give them (in this 
as in other cases) a fuller, deeper rneaning than they had 
borne in the mouths of other teachers ; (b) that His first 
hearers may have in some cases failed to grasp the new 
meaning and thus misrepresented His teaching by an 
unintelligent literalness ; (c) that we run a like risk in 
interpreting the language of our Lord and of the New Testa- 
ment writers who shared His free view of time and eternity. 
A prosaic treatment of poetry has been a constant bane of 
theology. 

" The great future belongs to Jesus Christ and to His 
Church. This is the ultimate meaning of New Testament 
apocalyptic " (Swete, The Ascended Christ, p. 139). 

1 N. Talbot, The Mind of the Disciples, p. 195 (Macmillan, 
1 914). A bracing book for the new days. 



CHAPTER IV 

ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 

THE whole Christology of the Church . . . has 
been its effort to conceive by thought the 
reahty it hved on in its faith of Christ's saving work 
and presence for good and all" (Forsyth, The Person 
and Place oj Jesus Christ, p. 330). Yes : if the 
Church had been governed according to the theology 
of its best thinkers, Christianity would surely have 
escaped this degradation from its high estate. But 
in fact a great deal of Christian writing and teaching 
is very confused. So often a matter is but half thought 
through. We all suffer from the difficulty of com- 
passing eternities with terms of time and space. 
Speech is inadequate to experience ; more particularly 
administrators are too often impatient of deep thought. 
Much current Christology seems to be definitely at 
variance with the New Testament experience of 
Christ. The Church has strayed from the Way, and 
her experience is not what it was ; or rather, is not 
understood as it was then understood. For here 
again we have to note the contrast between the life 
experience of individual Christians and the corporate 
expression of it by Church authorities. 

Let us consider, first, theology within the Church ; 
then secondly, theology outside the Church : both 
very briefly. 

43 



44 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

Within the organized Church, much current theolog}^ 
has hardened into a scheme of Christ's movements 
which seems to involve ideas about Ascension, Pente- 
cost and Advent at variance with the Church's funda- 
mental faith. Let us look at each of these three doc- 
trines, fiiit from the New Testament and secondly 
from our modem standpoint. 

The Ascension is popularly supposed to convey the 
idea that Christ departed. 

(i) A person unfamiliar with the Gospels might 
infer from many sermons and hymns that the Gospels 
give concurrent testimony to the Ascension as an 
externa] event involving Christ's departure. In fact, 
St. Luke alone thus records it : and he ends his Gospel 
with the disciples' joy and begins the Acts with a 
reference back to the Gospel as recording what Jesus 
began to do and teach. Moreover, he associates with 
his story of seeming departure a promise of return, 
which was speedily fulfilled at Pentecost and verified 
throughout his narrative. 

The first Gospel ends with the assurance of Christ's 
perpetual presence. The appendix to St. Mark (x\d. 
ver. 19), mentions the Ascension as an article of faith 
rather than as a temporal and local event, and connects 
it with the statement that the Lord continued to work 
with the disciples ever5Avhere ; it is not a fact of 
departure, but a condition of power, that is here 
asserted. The fourth Gospel gives no place to any 
idea of Christ's separation from men. 

To none of the Gospel writers did the " taking up " 
involve an end of Christ's personal presence with 
His disciples. 

(2) Nowadays we all understand that heaven is 
not a place. " Taken up to heaven " is a symbol of 



ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 45 

spiritual process. It involves the end of seeing, the 
beginning of a more intimate, less contingent associa- 
tion. " As long as our purpose depends for its vitality 
on any circumstance, though that circumstance be the 
Son of God Himself, it may be affected by a change 
of circumstance. Only when a man's purpose is 
firmly fixed apart from any regard to any circumstances 
will it be sure to stand unmoved by all chances and 
changes. So long as the disciples' devotion was 
governed by Christ visibly present in the flesh it was 
unstable ; another visible presence could shake it. 
Only when Christ returned to dwell in them by His 
Spirit — only when their whole minds and wills were 
become moulded in the fashion of Christ's, only then 
was their spiritual life secure. And we have to ask 
ourselves, which stage of the spiritual life are we now 
in ? Is Christ for us an attractive and impressive 
Figure who lived in Palestine two thousand years 
ago, and left an ideal of religious and moral conduct 
which we intend, if possible, to follow ? or is He 
an abiding Presence in our hearts and wills, moulding 
our purpose and controlling our impulses ? Is He a 
mere example or an inspiring influence ? Is He for 
us a dead Man, or the living God ? " (W. Temple, 
Repton School Sermons, p. 126). 

'' When the mortality of Christ was finally con- 
quered. He delocalized His presence, not to decrease, 
but on the contrary to intensify it, to make possible a 
new and inclusive localization. The Christ spirit 
represents not a lesser but a greater, not a contracted, 
but an expanded, self-personification or personaHza- 
tion. The more spiritual a personality becomes, the 
more intensely real it grows to be, and so the more 
widely and deeply available. His presence becomes 



46 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

an atmosphere and influence, without losing its tran- 
scendent completeness in the luxuriance of its increased 
immanence. The presence of the Paraclete took the 
place of the localized Christ not as a bare substitute 
but as that which constitutes a superior presence, 
including all that it held foriirierly and adding great- 
ness to greatness, riches to wealth. In going Christ 
came in a fulness which was wanting before He went, 
the fulness of added availability, a higher degree of 
presence " (Bishop Brent, Presence, pp. 39, 40, and 
passim. Cf. also Swete, The Ascended Christ, 
passim) . 

Pentecost similarly is popularly regarded as the com- 
ing of another than Christ. 

(i) The one passage in the New Testament sugges- 
tive of this idea of a substitute, giving Christ's words : 
" I will send you another Comforter," contains also 
His promise : "I come unto you." The supposed 
separation of the Spirit from Christ is alien to the 
thought of the New Testament (cf. Rom. viii. 9-1 1). 

(2) The idea is philosophically intolerable. It is 
but a crude outcome of our human separateness, 
which allows us to speak of Spirit acting apart from 
Person, or of Christ being " impersonally present." 
" We know that the Son of God has come " (i John v.) 
is the New Testament verdict, backed by Christian 
experience through the ages- 

Advent teaching likewise commonly emphasizes the 
idea that the Church has to wait for Christ 

(i) The Gospel conviction of the early return of 
Christ, within that generation, has been already spoken 
of (see chap. 1 1,, above). But as it is now assumed that 
He did not return, theologians have to discuss this 
mistake of the early Church, and even of Christ Him- 



ABSENTEE CHRISTOLCGY 47 

self.^ This early error, with its sequel of disillusion- 
ment, has become such a commonplace in theology 
that it is often taken as a datum for fixing the dates of 
the Gospels. Is there any evidence of this tremendous 
experience of disillusionment on the part of the early 
Church in regard to this central item of its faith ? 
Is not the central fact of the early Church its experi- 
ence of the truth of God, its absolute confidence in 
Christ ratified in every trial, the victory of its faith 
over the world ? (cf. above, chap. III). 

(2) The Church in allowing itself to suppose that 
it has to wait for Christ is applying to itself teaching 
that properly applies to the world, i.e., to human 
society organized in ignorance of Him. It is attri- 
buting to God the deficiencies of men. It is true that 
** the whole world lieth in the evil one " ; i.e., Christ 
has not yet come to them for judgment and dehver- 
ance. But " we know that the Son oj God is come, and 
hath given us an understanding, that we know Him 
that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in 
His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and 
eternal Life." Therefore any other form of worship 
than that of the present Christ, in whom we are, is 
idolatry. " My little children, guard yourselves from 
idols " (conclusion of i John). It is putting fancies 
in place of fact. Certainly there is a waiting for 
Christ to come ; but certainly there is also, and 
primarily, the fact of His having come and being with 
us for ever. And it is only by knowledge of His having 
already come to us that we can have any faith in 
His future coming to the world. ^ Just so far as the 
Church loses faith in His Presence, she loses power of 

1 Cf. e.g., such passages as Matthew x. 23, xvi. 28, xxiv, 34. 

2 Cf . Walpole, Vital Religion, conclusion. 



48 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

proclaiming His coming. The present worldliness 
and powerlessness of the Church are due to her putting 
herself in the place of_the world, waiting for Christ to 
come. The reducUo ad absurdum of this type of 
theology is given in a hymn much used : 

" And so the holy Church is here 
Although her Lord is gone." 

Absentee theology reflects lack of experience of 
Christ, and promotes thought of Him as a historic 
figure of the past. We turn then now to a brief glance 
at theological writers outside the organized Church. 
For first we have the Church apart from Christ, and 
then, as a natural sequel, the study of Christ apart 
from the Church. The Church's credal assertions of 
Christ's divinity are of no avail against the testimony 
of her hfe. The evidence of the Church's divisions, 
and inadequacy in face of modern conditions, affords 
strong presumption to the outsider that she has not 
in fact found in Christ the Person and the Power of 
God. I take as typical of a mass of theological writing 
the following words of Professor Moore (Professor of 
Theology in Harvard University) in Christian Thought 
since Kant : '' There are two religious views of the 
person of Christ which have stood from the beginning, 
the one over against the other. The one saw in Jesus 
of Nazareth a man, distinguished by his special caUing 
as the Messianic king, endued with special powers, 
lifted above all men ever known, yet a man, completely 
subject to God in faith, obedience and prayer. This 
view is surely sustained by many of Jesus' own words 
and deeds. It shines through the testimony of the 
men who followed Him. Even the behef in His resur- 
rection and His second coming did not altogether do 
away with it. The other view saw in Him a new God 



ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 49 

who, descending from God, brought mysterious powers 
for the redemption of mankind into the world, and 
after short obscuring of His glory, returned to the 
abode of God, where He had been before. From this 
belief come all the prayers to Jesus as to God, all 
miracles and exorcisms in His Name " (p. 147). " The 
problem of theological reflexion was to find the right 
middle course, to keep the divine Christ in harmony, 
on the one side, with monotheism, and on the other, 
with the picture which the Gospels gave. Belief knew 
nothing of these contradictions. The same simple 
soul thanked God for Jesus and His sorrows and His 
sympathy, as man's Guide and Helper, and again 
prayed to Jesus because He seemed too wonderful 
to be a man. The same kind of faith achieves the 
same wondering and touching combination to-day, 
after two thousand years. With thought comes 
trouble. Reflexion wears itself out upon the insoluble 
difficulty, the impossible combination, the flat con- 
tradiction, which the two views present, so soon as 
they are clearly seen " (p. 148). 

With all of us our mental standpoint is (or should 
be) the outcome of our experience. If therefore it 
is the case, as it seems to be, that God is not united 
with man in the Christian world to-day, as He was 
once, as we hope He will be soon, it need not appear 
strange that thinkers find it hard to beheve that God 
and man were ever one. We even acquiesce in that 
curious phenomenon of modern thought that behef 
in the divinity of Christ has been associated with 
conservatism and traditionalism, and commonly 
repudiated by so-called liberal thinkers. The refuta- 
tion of the so-called " Hberal " view of Christ has been 
effected not so much by any evidence of the Church's 

D 



50 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

triumphant life to-daj^ as bj^ the further processes of 
that same hberal research. The Church of the present 
does not afford the irrefutable evidence afforded by 
the Church of the past. It is then a momentous fact 
for us that liberal research has discovered for itself 
that lower views of Christ are untenable. Though 
they are still loudty proclaimed in some quarters, 
as in the passage quoted above, they are already dis- 
posed of. Critical thought is thus presenting a new 
challenge to the Church : if Christ cannot be set down 
as a mere man, can the Church show that He is God ? 
In this view of the results of criticism I base myself 
on Professor Loofs' work, What is the Truth about 
Jesus Christ ; ^ and I hope that it is not beside our 
point to dwell a little on that excellent conspectus of 
the course of critical thought during the past century. 
Men have been very busy about Christ, and we ought 
to know the outcome of their thinking. Loofs, as 
it were, leads us out of the maze and shows that there 
is an outcome of all this multitudinous speculation 
and research. He shows that there were two main 
lines of attack on the thought that Jesus was God. 
The first was " that Jesus was only a deit}^ falsely 
changed into a man by tradition " ; i.e., that He was 
an imaginary being, that never really existed. This 
view now claims little attention, having been destroyed 
by the process of thought, being " simply disproved 
by what we know for certain about Jesus from St. 
Paul." The second and more important view was that 
Jesus was only a man, this being " the assumption 
necessary for historical science." But now this 

1 Lectures at Oherlin. By Friedrich Loofs, Professor of 
Church History in the University of Halle (T. and T. Clark, 
1913). 



ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 51 

view '' cannot prevail before the tribunal of historical 
science itself, because it does not do justice to the 
sources and is not tenable in itself." ^ " Science has 
to respect realities, and it is a reality that the faith 
in Jesus the vSaviour has been a power in history, and 
still is a power in the world up to the present day. 
Historical science cannot do justice to the sources 
with its assumption that the life of Jesus was a purely 
human life. It cannot draw a credible picture of 
Jesus. . . . The presupposition that this Hfe was a 
purely human life . . . is false " (pp. 159, 160). 

But Loots is at pains to show that this conclusion 
does not lead him to accept the " orthodox " belief 
in the Divinity of Christ. " The conviction that God 
dwelt so perfectly in Jesus through His Spirit, as had 
never been the case before and never will be till the 
end of all time, does justice to what we know histori- 
cally about Jesus, and may, at the same time, be re- 
garded as satisfactorily expressing the unique position 
of Jesus which is a certainty to faith. It also justifies 
our finding God in Christ when we pray to Him. . . . 

1 " It is bound either to come into such a skeptical attitude 
towards the sources that it is forced to give up all hope of 
obtaining a picture of the person and the activity of Christ — 
and that is not in harmony with our most definite knowledge, 
viz., that there existed a community shortly after the death 
of Jesus which revered him very highly and must have taken 
a lively interest in his words and deeds. Or, if it puts more 
confidence in the sources, Jesus and his deeds and his experi- 
ences must seem to exceed the ordinary human measure so 
far that the only possible frame for his self-consciousness 
must be found in a highly exaggerated INIessianic conscious- 
ness of majesty, which no longer agrees with normal human 
life. Then Jesus appears as a religious enthusiast, and it 
seems natural to ask whether he was psychologically sound. 
But such a view does not agree with the deepest and greatest, 
and therefore certainly most genuine, words of Jesus which 
we have in the Gospels " (pp. 120, 121). 



52 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

My last refuge, therefore, is the term which Paul 
strongly emphasizes in the Epistles to the Colossians 
and Ephesians, the mystery of Christ. And what is 
this mystery ? God was in Christ reconciling the 
world unto Himself, that is the mystery. It would be 
attempting impossible things if we tried to under- 
stand the historical person of Christ " (pp. 239, 240). 

" My last refuge," says Professor Loots ; and, if I 
may say so, the phrase seems to me to betray the 
fundamental attitude of the main body of that modern 
critical and philosophical thought which does not 
accept belief in the Divinity of Christ. It is essen- 
tially an attitude of flight. It is flight on the one 
hand from " orthodoxy " and " ecclesiastical inter- 
pretations " ; and we cannot deny that orthodoxy, or 
its exposition in organized Christianity, scares away 
many honest and true souls. The Church does not 
now exhibit that original light spoken of in St. John 
iii. 19-21; that so sifts men that every one that doeth 
ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest 
his works should be reproved. But he that doeth the 
truth cometh to the light, that his works may be made 
manifest that they have been wrought of God. 

On the other hand this attitude of flight does often 
involve a moral failure in the fugitive. The Cross is 
still foolishness to the Greeks. There is still that 
fundamental difficulty for human thought of seeing '| 
in the Crucified the ultimate truth of God ; the diffi- 
culty that lies in taking up my cross and following 
Him : my native repugnance to such an ideal of life. 

To return for a moment to Professor Loots* most 
valuable summary of the results of critical study of 
the facts of Christ, we see that historical science has 
found itself unable to arrive at an}?^ tenable view of 



ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 53 

Christ. Professor Loofs himself, has hardly found a 
satisfactory way of escape. If he could dismiss from 
his mind the fear of irrational " orthodoxy," and 
stand and face steadily that " mystery " which St. 
Paul emphasizes, he would surely admit that to St. 
Paul the most prominent aspect of the mystery was 
the mystery of " Christ in you " (Col. i. 27) : not the 
fact of the past, that God was in Christ, but the fact of 
the present that Christ is in you and you are in Christ. 
But this conception takes us out of the plane of his^ 
torical event on to the plane of eternal truth. And 
although Loofs, as we have seen, fully realizes the 
failure of liberal criticism to confine Christ within the 
categories of historical science, he shrinks from that 
passage to the eternal which those take who acknow- 
ledge Christ as God, and like x\rius of old prefers to 
take refuge in semi-divinity. 

Absentee Christology reduces Christian thought to 
confusion. It muddles the testimony of the New 
Testament, partly by applying to the end of the world 
Christ's teaching about return after His death, partly 
by assuming that express promises of speedy return 
were unfulfilled. But far more serious is the fact that 
it muddles life. We need but briefly mention three 
outstanding features of the muddle of modern Chris- 
tendom : — 

{a) The ecclesiastical muddle. Divided Christendom 
is denial of Christ. We have traditions of the past 
instead of facts of the present. 

[h) The social muddle. In the supposed absence of 
Christ His revelation of God is not really accepted by 
Christians. Other facts than Christ are declared to 
be fundamental to human nature. It is assumed 
that you will only get the best out of children, or out 



54 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

of adults, by setting them against one another, each 
for himself. So the Church has allowed the whole 
social order to be based on competition, not co-opera- 
tion : on self, not on Christ. Hence war between 
Christian nations. 

(c) The personal muddle. We need but ask our- 
selves : Are we, and our families, so living in Christ 
that all things in peace and order move, and there is 
immediate remedy for misunderstandings and fric- 
tions ? Christians sometimes say that " in God's own 
good time " they will be reconciled (meantime they 
will not). The faith in Christ present is thus muddled 
with the idea of His temporary absence. We lack 
that sense of presence of the eternal, of presence in the 
eternal which St. Paul expressed in the phrase " in 
Christ," and which is the burden of St. John's Epistle 
and of the whole New Testament. 

We need to repent of this habit of putting God away 
from us. The Son of God was manifested on purpose 
to end this aloofness : Emmanuel, God with us. Vital 
rehgion consists in acknowledging the presence of 
Christ. By thus knowing Him I have eternal life. 
Eternal truths become my personal possession. In 
religion, to individualize is to eternalize. I and God, 
the individual and the eternal, are brought together. 

Here lies the secret of the vital force possessed by 
each of the opposing religious parties. " Catholics " 
know that they have an impregnable position as to 
the reality of sacramental grace ; for every real Chris- 
tian among them knows that by these sacraments he 
is here and now Unked to the eternal God ; he rightly 
repudiates any idea of them as mere memorials of the 
past. " EvangeHcals " know that the Bible is the 
Word of God, because by it He actually has spoken 



ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 35 

and does speak to them personally ; every real Chris- 
tian among them rightly refuses to let questions of 
historical criticism take the place of this personal 
contact with the living God. 

The personal contact with God and Christ is sure 
enough : it is the corporate expression of it that is so 
fatuous. But then the corporate expression re-acts 
on our individual faith ; our outlook is blurred, our 
mind muddled. We need to return to God, to put us 
all straight. And in God we shall get the final answer 
to our question ; for in God we shall find Christ. 
This, then, is the next point in our discussion. 



' CHAPTER V 
CHRIST IN GOD 

THIS book is addressed to Christians, who believe 
in God and in Christ. We know God, His 
being, His nature. His power, as revealed to us by 
Christ. We know Christ as the universal human 
ideal, to which both the individual and society are to 
grow up. In Him both the individual and the cor- 
porate personaHty are to find completion. Christ is 
Personality. Is He not ? (Eph. iv." 12-16). 

Violence then is anti-Christ : " violence " in the 
sense of brute force, external force which ignores the 
inner facts and meanings of personality. For the 
ignoring of personahty is the antithesis of love. Some 
attribute violence to Christ, e.g., in the cleansing of 
the temple ; but we can see that this so-called violence 
on His part was not such as to crush or injure person- 
ality. Violence, ignoring personality, is anti-Christ ; 
for it is misuse and misrepresentation of the power of 
God, and misuse and mutilation of the capacities of 
men. 

But in our loss of the sense of the presence of Christ 
we habitually attribute violence to God. " The act of 
God " stands as the technical term for the loss of 
property at sea, by fire or storm. Though in our 
language of devotion we adhere to true rehgious faith 

56 



CHRIST IN GOD 57 

in the all-embracing love of God, from which nothing 
can separate us, yet in our everyday language we 
commonly adopt and hear a very different note, about 
the common accidents (as we regard them) of Ufe, 
about the weather, about sickness. So it comes about 
that tragedies such as the Italian earthquakes have 
formed some of the hardest problems for the faith of 
the modern man. In a world of blind destructive 
forces, where and what is God ? where and what is 
Christ ? 

The trouble is that whatever our individual faith 
may be, we corporately have lost the essential Chris- 
tian view of the world. It often seems that our faith 
is not really monotheistic, or at least that we do not 
understand the application of monotheism to the facts 
of Ufe. Some of us indeed have been impressed by 
teachers like James Hinton, who as a man of science 
ably maintained that the apparent inertness of nature 
is really our inertness ; that what we regard as nature's 
deadness crushing our Hfe is really our deadness clash- 
ing with nature's life (see e.g. his Man and his Dwelling- 
Place, passim). But our dull agnosticism persists, in 
spite of the repeated testimony of modern scientists 
to the unity of the universe in the laws and the love of 
God. To quote the writer of a paper for the Pan- 
Anglican Congress (G. F. C. Searle, F.R.S., in vol. iii. 
of the Report) on The Modern Conception of the Uni- 
verse : " The unity of the universe makes it impossible 
to suppose that we can ever cut ourselves off from the 
operations of those laws. Did we but realize this, we 
should covet earnestly the spirit of holy fear. When 
men have this spirit they not only pay reverent atten- 
tion to spiritual things, but also think and speak 
reverently of all the things of the material world, as. 



58 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

for example, of the weather. They are conscious that 
they are dweUing in the Temple of God, and it is the 
joy of their hves to give Him their worship and their 
obedience." Dr. A. W. Robinson ^ thus summarizes 
the present position of theological and scientific 
thought : " There is reason to hope that the bitterness 
of old controversies will not be revived, and that we 
have before us a time in which Theology and Science 
will co-operate and no longer conflict. With deepen- 
ing insight it is becoming plainer than ever that the 
phenomena of life, and even of matter, are the expres- 
sion of a more than physical force. Evolution is a law 
under which a forward process is moving on, and mov- 
ing up. There is an impulse of consciousness working 
from within, and there is a spiritual, as well as a 
material, environment inviting to correspondence with 
itself. Freedom and power of choice are admitted to 
be present in regions where their existence was for 
long most strenuously denied. Even matter may 
have its owm power of insistence and resistance — ^how 
much more mind and will. This consideration may 
give us a yet clearer clue to the mysteries of failure, 
miscarriage and waste. A world that w^as to produce 
self-conscious, self-determining personalities needed to 
have freedom through the whole of its development ; 
and the consequent risk and possible cost were inevit- 
able. Shall we not be led to admire and revere in- 
creasingly the wonder of it all, as there grows upon us 
the sense of the quietness and gentleness, the foresight 
and the infinite patience of the Being of beings, who 
will never obtrude His presence and action upon us, 
just because He would help us to be our own, not dead 

'^ God and the World : A Survey of Thought, pp. 104-5. 
S.P.C.K., 1914. 



CHRIST IN GOD 59 

but living, selves, and would have us rise with Him to 
the highest things." So Tennyson : — 

" Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason why ; 
For is He not all but that which has power to feel ' I am I ? ' 
Glory about thee, without thee ; and thou fulfiUest thy 

doom 
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and 

gloom. 
Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit 

can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and 

feet." 1 

The fact that in our ordinary thinking and writing 
we have so lost the romance of monotheism accounts 
in part for eager welcome given to Gitanjali and 
other books by Rabindranath Tagore. For he is one 
who dares to commune and have fun with God in the 
facts of life.^ 

" The quietness and gentleness, the foresight and the 
infinite patience " of God. So say scientists and poets, 
and so says every soul that knows Him. And yet we 
allow ourselves to be fooled by the hallucination that 
He is violent. We indulge in slipshod newspaper 
views ; in accounts of earthquakes and the hke, allow- 
ing our attention to be fixed on this apparent violence 
of circumstances viewed externally, and not on the 
personal attitude and condition of the individuals 
affected, — not, that is, on the presence or absence of 



1 Tennyson, " The Higher Pantheism." 

2 Much of the charm of R. L. Stevenson, too, is of the same 
kind. Cf. especially his well-known lines, " The Celestial 
Surgeon," in Underwoods, beginning : 

" If I have faltered more or less 
In my great task of happiness." 



6o WHERE IS CHRIST? 

Christ in their field of consciousness ; not on their 
understanding or misunderstanding of the whole 
affair. It was indeed not necessary to wait for modern 
scientists and poets to reveal to us the true character 
of the universe. For, as we have seen, it was to events 
of this kind that Christ specially referred in His so- 
called eschatological discourses, declaring the trans- 
formation, the transvaluation of them by His presence. 
To one therefore who accepts Christ's view of things 
our modern newspaper view is a hopeless misreading 
of events, presenting insoluble difficulties to faith : 
being an attempt to understand the world apart from 
Christ. It might be supposed that a Christian was 
one who, by reflection or experience or both, had been 
led to give'up that attempt as futile, having learned 
indeed that " in Him all things consist." But as a 
matter of fact the normal level of conversation and of 
thought, in the Church or out of it, is to regard the 
events of the world, to describe them, see and feel 
them, as external catastrophes, not as internal personal 
experiences of the infinite love of God. In other words, 
our minds are out of tune with God. If we were in 
tune with Him, either these things would not happen, 
because we should know enough of His laws to prevent 
them ; or if they happened, they would take on an 
utterly different aspect and character, being treated 
from the personal and not the impersonal point of 
view. Throughout this book I am trying to keep 
close to the actual facts of life, and therefore of my 
own hfe among others. So here perhaps I may 
illustrate from individual experience these two points 
about catastrophes, their prevention and their inter- 
pretation. Here in the interior of China my " parish " 
is constantly suffering from floods, caused by a river 



CHRIST IN GOD 6i 

breaking its banks and making new courses across the 
country year after year ; and the people sit by and 
starve, seeing no means of coping with this devastating 
force. We coming from the West know that the 
trouble is not inevitable ; that if the people or their 
government had enough of the spirit of love to make 
them able to work together for the common good, 
there is engineering knowledge and skill adequate for 
preventive measures. The catastrophes could be 
avoided by men coming more in tune with God. And 
as to the transmutation of external catastrophe by 
internal realization of God, I can myself but testify 
what thousands in this war can testify from far wider 
experience : having been under fire from Chinese 
looting soldiers, with my friend shot dead at my side, 
I could grieve neither for him nor for myself, and 
friends who wrote about the " awful experience," 
*' too dreadful for words," did not tally with one's 
own sense of what happened. They only had the 
newspaper account ; I had the experience. This 
is the difference happening all the time between the 
external view of events and the internal experience of 
life. And every Christian has this knowledge to him- 
self, but generally forsakes it when he forms his ideas 
of things from newspapers or enters into conversation 
with others in the terms of current speech. This 
knowledge is a knowledge of the meaning of the uni- 
verse. ^ It is more than knowing the facts ; it is 
knowing their meaning, both what they mean to me 
and what they mean to God (for I can only understand 
them in proportion as I share God's view of them). 
For within God's facts there is a meaning, an answer, 
a response. And that eternal answer to God, the 
* I Johij y, 20 ; Eph, i, 9, 10. 



62 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

eternal meaning of His universe, is Christ. Christ is 
within God, His working within God's working. He 
on the page of history is the answer of human hfe to 
God who made it : He is the meaning of hfe. He is 
historically the revelation of the meaning of God, of 
God within God, of the possibihty and fact of the 
Cross within the Divine action, and within the Divine 
Being. So He becomes to men the interpretation of 
the ways of God. To know Christ is to understand 
God.^ In that understanding man recognizes a 
personal Divine meaning to himself in all that is and 
in all that happens, and recognizes too an individual 
claim on himself for certain action within the general 
scheme of things, a claim that he too should make 
response, have meaning, to God. So we may analyse 
belief in Christ as involving (a) emotional embrace 
of this Interpretation of the meaning of things ; (b) 
identification of will with His Will now recognized as 
operative in and through the whole system of the 
universe. So St. Paul spoke of " the God WTiose I 

^ Christ as the Meaning. The following simple propositions 
seem true, and expressive of this idea : — 

He is the meaning of man^ — to God and to himself. 

He is the meaning of each of us- — what we are for. 

He is the meaning of the universe — what it is for. 

He is thus the answer to God. 

In each of us He is our answer to God. 

We in Him make corporate response to God. 

A man in Christ makes perfect response to environment. 

The Church in Christ is wholly adjusted to the action of God. 

It is im.portant to remem.ber that all such abstract state- 
ments about Christ are based upon personal experience of 
Him. Apart from personal religion they are meaningless. 
But if in fact He is my God, I must in some such terms express 
my view of life. 

Only believe, and thou shalt see 
That Christ is all in all to thee. 



CHRIST IN GOD 63 

am, Whom also I serve." We both love and serve. 
Is it true of us, of you and of me ? Do we both love 
and serve ? and that not departmental^ but uni- 
versally ? Too often it seems that we live our lives, 
or at least we think our thoughts, departmentally. 
In our w^orship or in our creeds, for instance, how much 
do we think of the facts of God's evolutionary pro- 
cedure which are so familiar to our thought at other 
times ? Except when we are speciiically concerned 
with Christian Apologetics, do we moderns really find 
God and Christ central in our ideas of science, and of 
art and of history ? The word '' God " seems to have 
been eviscerated of meaning in modern literature and 
modern conversation. The Practice of the Presence of 
God is what we are all needing, what the whole world 
is needing : why has it been relegated to little books 
and little times of devotion ? The Cross of Christ 
gives us the meaning of the universe. We want a 
devotional grasp of the whole situation, not merely 
of individual forgiveness. Let us pause before the 
Fact of the Cross, which is Jesus Christ, our God. 

" God puts His world before you, and it is yours to 
make of it what you will. It is there. The trees of 
the garden in which you Uve may be much or may be 
little to you ; they may be everything or nothing. 
But they are there. And then here stands this other 
fact, a fact still ; it is' there. Truth holds the door 
open for the future. You see, there is something more 
there than any of our theologies. As Rendel Harris 
once said to me — we were talking of Clement of Alex- 
andria — ' No one sings, " How sweet the name of 
Logos sounds." ' You cannot. It is not He, do you 
see ? But there is He, and there is He dying. The 
fact stands, and will stand : the great fact standing 



64 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

out for you and me, to judge ourselves by, to make 
what we can of, and to be re-made by it. At any 
rate, there it is ; beyond all theologies, beyond all 
dogma — the fact of the death of Jesus Christ upon the 
cross. And it is for you to settle with yourself and 
with God, by Whose Will it was there and you are 
here, what you make of it. What will you make of 
it ? What will it make of you ? " ^ 

It has hitherto made so little of us, so Uttle of the 
Church, so Httle of the world, because we have been 
making so little of it. " Remember, whatever you 
make of Christ and His death, past, present and future, 
are one story — it is, ' Jesus Christ the same yesterday 
and to-day and forever,' and whatever He has been to 
those to whom He was most, He may be again to you 
and me — and more yet, beyond our thinking." ^ 

A man in Christ will understand God and what 
God does. That understanding puts an end to in- 
dividual isolation : each comes to himself as a social 
being, linked to all his fellows, partaker in the one Life. 
In Christ we are members one of another, because we 
have come into line with the workings of God, who 
works in us mightily ; we are conformed to the laws 
of nature. Therefore in Christ, in the absolute society 
that is in Him, all human faculties have opportunity 
of fullest development. " All things are yours, and 
ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." " I thank my 
God always concerning you, for the grace of God which 
was given you in Christ Jesus, that in everything ye 
were enriched in Him, in all utterance and in all know- 
ledge." " In Him all the treasures of wisdom and 

* T. R. Glover, in Christ and Human Need (Addresses at 
Liverpool), Student Volunteer Missionary Union. 
2 Ibid. 



CHRIST IN GOD 65 

knowledge lie hidden." Here are the proper riches of 
the Church. 

Where then is Christ ? Christ is in God. His 
presence to us means the same as, yet more than, the 
presence of God. For it means the answer of God to 
Himself ; the world or the man no longer worked by 
God only, but working with Him voluntarily. To that 
presence men and women attained who gave them- 
selves up to love : such is the testimony of the New 
Testament, of those who first knew Christ in Palestine, 
and afterwards knew Him in God : and such is the 
history of the Church through the ages. 

That real history of the Church has not been and 
perhaps cannot be written. It lies not in the events 
and actions viewed externally, but in their inner 
meaning to the actors and sufferers : not in circum- 
stances, but in the Hfe that is hid with Christ in God. 
That is what entitles it to be called the Divine Society, 
That alone accounts for its continuance till now, in 
spite of all its sins and blunders in the past, in spite 
of all the inadequacies and muddles of which we are 
conscious in the present. 

The Church still exists : but its Ufe is enfeebled, 
because we have so largely put God away from us. 
We have misunderstood God. We have neither shaped 
our minds nor tuned our lips ' to Immanent and 
Transcendent Love. 

Only as we priests and ministers of the Living God 
return to Him can we or the Church or the world be 
saved. For it is we who are obviously responsible 
before God and man for the corporate expression of 
reHgion, and for its inadequacy over against the 
adequacy of personal experience of Christ. 

Misunderstanding of God is bound up with mis- 

£ 



66 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

understanding of men. Misreading the divine nature 
we misread human nature. FaiHng to see Christ in 
God, we fail to acknowledge and adore Him in aU His 
members. Hence the disunion of Christendom, our 
failure of love. " He who does not love, does not 
know God, for God is love." 



CHAPTER VI 

THE VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL 
EXPERIENCE 

WE Christians all know that we ought to love 
one another. By baptism, by profession, we 
too, like those first Christians, have given ourselves 
up to love. Our trouble, the tragedy of Christendom, 
is that in seeking to obey the Christ Who gave us this 
commandment, in trying to be true to our profession, 
we find ourselves ranged in mutually opposed sections, 
between whom the love felt is Httle and the love shown 
even less. We Christians are all (or most of us) so 
sure of our own position that we cannot allow our- 
selves to suppose that another position held by other 
people may be equally right. We have all been 
schooled in particular doctrines as to the essential 
means of grace, and the fundamental conditions of 
membership in the Church ; and more than that, we 
all know in our own experience that our own way is 
right, efficacious, proved by the working of God in 
our own lives and in the fives of others whom we reach 
and teach. If not, we can hardly be Christians. 

We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, 
And long to feast upon Thee still ; 

We drink of Thee, the Fountain-head, 
And thirst our souls from Thee to fill: 

67 



68 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

Here may Thy faithful people know 

The blessings of Thy love. 
The streams that through the desert flow. 

The manna from above. 

" Thou dost assure us thereby of Thy favour and goodness 
towards us, and that we are very members incorporate in 
the mystical Body of Thy Son." 



From childhood up, as communicant, as deacon, 
priest, latterly as missionary, all I am and know and 
do as a Christian I owe to my membership in the 
Church of England. My communion and my com- 
mission are only mine through the faith and ordinances 
of this Church. Until I came out as a missionary 
to China I had personal acquaintance with hardly 
any member of any other rehgious body. 

But an eye-opening experience comes to many a 
man and woman sent out by this or that Church to 
propagate the faith in a heathen land. We are for the 
first time brought face to face in close association with 
men and women of other denominations. In the 
direct conflict with the elemental forces of evil and 
ignorance the fundamental attitude towards Hfe is 
the one thing that matters. Association in great 
enterprises, demanding the utmost that manhood and 
womanhood can be and give, reveals Christ in a new 
and stronger light. The war has been serving in the 
same way to bring members of different Churches, ^now 
united in a new fellowship of service and sacrifice, 
into this new attitude of mutual affection, and respect 
for each other's religious convictions and practices. 
The sense deepens that ours is not the only way to God ; 
that other ways are valid too, in that they are in fact 
what they profess to be, effectual means of grace. 

This indeed has long been recognized by our best 



VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 69 

teachers. For example, Bishop Woodford, in an 
address on " The Power of Absolution," quotes Bishop 
Andrewes : " Gratia Dei non alligatur mediis ; the 
grace of God is not bound, but free ; and can work 
without means of Word or Sacrament : and as without 
means, so without Ministers, how and when to Him 
seemeth good " ; and he continues, " All that is meant 
is that here is a Divinely appointed channel for con- 
vejdng God's pardon, and they who place themselves 
under it may be sure of receiving what they look for." ^ 
That God is not bound to His own laws is a famihar 
but unfortunate way of expressing this truth that 
there are facts of God outside our scheme. God is 
not tied, but we are. Why are we not free to come 
into line with God ? Where is that freedom with 
w^hich originally Christ set free His Church ? ^ 

But here comes in another part of the tragedy of 
Church History. Many a man or company of men, 
moved by dissatisfaction with the sectional position 
of their religious life contrasted with the catholic 
meaning of their faith, and seeking to move out into a 
wider unity of Christians, has ended informing one more 
sect. History seems to show that progress to catholic 
unity cannot be made by breaking away from one's 
own spiritual inheritance. And the same conclusion 
would follow from viewing Christianity as the religion 
of loyalty : loyalty will not grow out of disloyalty. 

The desire and hope for Christian Re-union grows 
from year to year, and as all roads seem blocked at 
home, it has become a commonplace in discussions 
of the subject to suggest that the desired lead will 

1 The Great Commission : Addresses on the Ordinal. By J. 
R. Woodford, Bishop of Ely (Rivingtons, 1886). 

2 Gal. ii. 4 and v. i. 



70 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

come from the Mission Field. Unfortunately this 
pious hope has hardly yet led to corresponding action 
by the home authorities ; for it is a too famiUar fact 
on the mission field that the missions are not free to 
move in the direction suggested, but are more or less 
rigidly controlled by the home boards. Our Anglican 
missions in particular are restrained by the duty of 
loyalty to the whole Anglican Communion, which 
allows no local section to advance independently 
towards fellowship with other kinds of Christians. ^ 

To expedite human action along the lines of God's 
working, we need knowledge of the actual facts, and 
not only knowledge but such acknowledgment of them 
that they become formative of our thoughts and 
determinative of our acts. By recognition of facts we 
escape from the bondage and powerlessness of our 
own preconceptions. It is thus that modern science, 
and still more the modern scientific habit of mind, 
is the great means of progress in every department of 
life. 

^ Yet on the mission field it seems strange to read such a 
pronouncement as the following, quoted in a Church paper 
under the heading " An S.P.G. Boycott," made by a London 
vicar : — 

" I have postponed making a statement as to the practical 
bearing of the ' Kikuyu ' pronouncement of the Archbishop 
of Canterbury on our collections for foreign Missions, in the 
hope that the S.P.G. might be able to give assurances that 
its funds would not be distributed to Dioceses where separatists 
are being admitted to our pulpits and Altars in defiance of the 
doctrine and discipline of the Church of England. So far the 
Society has declined to give assurances. It asks us to tell 
our friends that it s^rmpathizes with their anxieties and begs 
us to be content with the expression of this friendly sentiment. 
But we are not content. Until S.P.G. is able to make its 
position quite clear we shall suspend our annual collection 
for its funds, and there will be no Association in support of 
S.P.G. connected with All Saints." 



VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 71 

Many of us who have had some training in science 
or philosophy before taking up theology have been 
troubled by the realization that the latter has not 
hitherto fully shared in that liberation of human 
thought from its own entanglements which has led 
to all the advancement of learning in other depart- 
ments since the time of Bacon's Novum Organum. 
Archbishop Temple, in 1857, wrote : " Our theology 
has been cast in a scholastic mould, i.e., all based on 
logic. We are in need of and are gradually being 
forced into a theology based on psychology. The 
transition, I fear, will not be without much pain ; but 
nothing can prevent it." ^ 

" O my God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after 
Thee," said Kepler, as he traced the wonders of God's 
working in the stars. Surely not less should this be 
our acknowledgment as we trace His working in the 
minds of His children. But unfortunately the self- 
centredness incidental to most rehgion other than 
that of the living present Christ has till now hindered 
an unprejudiced study of rehgious facts, even by Chris- 
tians. Unless we each of us hold to faith in Christ 
present we relapse into the exclusiveness of Judaism, 
hugging our hnks with the past that mark us off from 
other men. We remain busy with the tombs of the 
prophets. We study and we teach what Christ was 
and did for our predecessors, rather than what He is 
and does for our contemporaries. We hold to what 
He said then, and hardly expect to hear Him say 
anything fresh to-day. The Word of God that the 
prophets heard we read in books. The very phrase 



1 Memoirs ii., p. 517. Quoted by his son in Foundations, 
p. 226, and also by Bishop Brent in Leadership, p. 257. 



72 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

" the Word of God," becomes technicalized and limited 
to the record of His words to the Jews. In our Chinese 
translation of the Prayer Book, for example, the prayer 
that Christians " may agree in the truth of Thy holy 
Word," which at least is capable of a wider meaning, 
becomes a prayer that they may acknowledge the 
truth of the Bible. Thus miracles and prophecy and 
gifts of healing and other gifts of the Spirit we are 
disposed to relegate to the distant past : we know 
little or nothing of such wonders now. For we know 
so httle about the presence of Christ in the " beloved 
community." Bishop Walpole, in Life's Chance, 
remarks that in these modem days of advancing 
science " the knowledge of love has not kept pace with 
the knowledge of the world." Similarly Bishop 
Brent : " Human greatness only begins to express 
itself in that creative power which, in recent years, 
has rejoiced inordinately in its abihty to invent or to 
organize matter. There is another sphere, as yet but 
sUghtly exploited, where work, equally creative 
though of a much more enduring character, is waiting 
for human operations — the sphere to which St. Paul 
refers when he says, * We look not at the things which 
are seen, but at the things which are not seen.* We 
shall never be able to vision more than a fraction of 
what we may know and be, until we Christians learn 
X as a body to practise eternity unremittingly and 
\^ arduously." ^ " The Christian experience of to-day, 
if there be any truth in the indwelHng of God's Spirit, 
is as worthy of respect in its bearing on theology as 
that of the first centuries. Early Christian theology 
was of necessity mainly psychological, with a moderate 
though sufficient regard for historicity as summed 
^ Presence. Bishop Brent, Longmans, 191 4. P. 51. 



VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 73 

up in the Hebraic past and for the essence of logic as 
embodied in current philosophies." ^ 

The unreadiness of theology to accept the data of 
the present is bound up with ignorance of the facts of 
love. We do not know what love is doing in the world 
to-day ; at least we know very little about it ; the 
Church does not concentrate upon this topic ; theo- 
logians do not make this their science. The facts of 
rehgious psychology, of the actual operations of the 
Spirit of God in the mind of man, are an almost unex- 
plored field for most of us, at least in the sphere of 
Church poHty. 

It is true that of recent years there has been a be- 
ginning made in the scientific exploration and classifi- 
cation of the facts of religious experience. James's 
Varieties of Religious Experience stands out here. 
But it is noteworthy that his study was of abnormal 
types, and not of the everyday facts of the Christian 
life. A good deal of work in this direction has since 
been done ; " psychology '* becomes almost a shib- 
boleth in writings on rehgious instruction. But the 
Church as a body, as an organized whole, is still un- 
moved. Her system and methods are not yet revised 
in accordance with our growing knowledge of the facts 
of love. 2 

* Leadership. Bishop Brent. P. 258. 

2 In this connection it seems worth noting that no adequate 
work seems yet to have been done in the field of social psy- 
chology, properly so called ; i.e., in the study of the facts of 
corporate life. Some of us at least have for years been looking 
in vain for such books. The writings of Le Bon on " the 
Crowd ' ' are too superficial to satisfy any who see in human 
society more than a crowd of individuals. McDougall's Social 
Psychology, in spite of its title, is still a study of individual 
life, in its social bearing indeed, but not of the corporate life 
of society. The Church still holds the secret of corporate 



74 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

Let us indeed recognize that a science of psychology 
in any complete sense may be an impossibility. Modern 
philosophy and science will both lend support to the 
protest of rehgion against reducing the facts of Ufe 
to the action of predetermined law. We are not mere 
examples of general principles. Individual initiative is 
conceded to beings much lower than man. " No 
mathematics could calculate the orbit of a common 
house-fly," says Sir Oliver Lodge. ^ 

Nevertheless these are facts of hfe, and it is possible 
to review them impartially and arrange them systema- 
tically. This has been the proper work of the Church 
from the first. The law of forgiveness as declared in 
the words of absolution is a case in point : " He pardon- 
eth and absolveth all them that truly repent and un~ 
feignedly believe." There is therefore a fair field for 
religious psychology : a field in which the Fathers 
worked : a field now white unto harvest. 

And there is a worker in this field, Baron von Hiigel, 
whose work is of inestimable value for the solution 
of the present difficulty about the re-union of Christen- 
dom : the difficulty of combining loyalty to the past 
with freedom in the present. In his monumental 
work on the Mystical Element in Religion he has helped 
us to get deeper into the problem than most of us 
could get without him. He shows how religion essen- 
tially consists in three elements : the institutional, the 
rational and the mystical, corresponding broadly to 
the predominant instincts and interests of the three 
stages of human life, childhood, youth and manhood. 

life : to her failure to divulge it is due this blank in our modem 
outlook. 

^ In Presidential Address to the British Association, 191 3. 
Quoted in God and the World, by Dr. A. W. Robinson. 



VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIEKCE 75 

He speaks of " Sense and Memory, the Child's means 
of approaching ReHgion " ; " Question and Argument, 
the Youth's mode of approaching Rehgion " ; and 
** Intuition, Feehng and VoHtional requirements and 
evidences, the Mature Man's special approaches to 
Faith." 1 

Every one in childhood accepts the facts of his own 
environment and of his own teachers as the facts. Not 
only his words, but his thoughts and his views, are for 
the most part taken over wholesale from them into 
his own inner life. He is interested in aU the external 
organization and manners of his home, his school, his 
church ; these are the facts that hold him. Only 
later comes the stage of questioning — not the child's 
superficial "why," but the youth's probing "why." 
Then things have to justify themselves to his reason ; 
he must trace their causes and connections. This 
stage also passes for most of us in adult hfe ; we pass 
from argument to action ; we settle into the proved 
verdicts of experience : we are concerned with effect- 
ing results rather than with investigating causes. 
Life now^ contains many things that cannot be reduced 
to formulas. 

Though the stages are distinguished, yet the three 
elements successively predominant are concurrent 
throughout Hfe. Though one comes to the top, the 
others are below. Together they constitute our 
spiritual Hfe. Von Hiigel shows how these three 
elements go to make up all our mental activity. " At 
the very source of all our certainty, of the worth attri- 
butable to the least or greatest of our thoughts and 

^ In The Threefold Strand of Belief (Modem Oxford Tracts : 
Longmans, 6d. net). Dr. H. Scott Holland gives a clear view 
of these three elements of religion as analysed by Von Hiigel. 



76 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

feeHngs and acts, we already find the three elements ' 
indubitable sensation, clear thought, warm faith in 
and through action." 

^ The value of this kind of scientific analysis of re- 
Hgion is that it enables us to deal with facts instead of 
prejudices. The fact of supreme importance for our 
present discussion is that the denominational inherit- 
ance in which we have been brought up is our inahen- 
able and ineradicable possession. We are hkely to 
find ourselves fighting against God if we try to break 
away from it. We look down on God if we look down 
on others because their inheritance is different from 
our own. Von Hiigel says : " This traditional element 
not aU the rehgious genius in the world can ever escape 
or replace : it was there, surrounding and moulding 
the very pre-natal existence of each one of us ; it will 
be there long after we have left the scene. We five 
and die its wise servants and stewards, or its bhnd 
slaves, or in futile, impoverishing revolt against it : 
we never, for good or for evil, really get beyond its 
reach." ^ 

God would have each of us true to his own past, 
loyal to the community that has brought him up. 

Modern science has thus brought us face to face 
with the same facts on a large scale that the early 
Church faced and obeyed on a small scale. " If God 
has given them exactly the same gift as He gave us 
when we beheved in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was 
I— how could I try— to thwart God ? " The 
Church then learned that fellowship was not to be 
limited to the holders of special Divinely-given privi- 
leges from the past. The present working of Christ 
then outweighed all tradition. To-day we are in 

1 Op. cit., vol. i., p. 59. 



VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 77 

face of religious facts vaster than any that they could 
know. Can we equally obey ? Can we similarly 
allow facts to transcend tradition ? 

Let us try to make this point a Uttle clearer : for 
there is an apparent contradiction. On the one hand 
we say that the traditional element of reHgion is 
ineradicable, an essential part of each man's spiritual 
life. On the other hand we say that traditions must 
give way to present facts. The point Ues in the dis- 
tinction between God's tradition and man's tradition ; 
between what God hands on from generation to genera- 
tion in fact and life, and what man hands on in word 
and theory. The latter divides men into disputatious 
sects ; the former unites men in reverence for the Father 
of all. For God's traditions are the facts of human Ufe, 
or rather of the Divine life in men, the facts of the one 
Spirit " dividing to each man severally as He will." 

We are faced with facts : as Christians we should 
rather say that we are faced with God. The denomi- 
national grounding is an essential factor of each man's 
religion, not because this may be proved from the 
Bible, nor because Church fathers and formularies have 
so declared, but because the Hving God does in fact so 
work in the Uves and minds of His children. Mutual 
recognition thus becomes not an aloof toleration, but 
a humble and whole-hearted acknowledgment of God. 

come, let us worship and fall down, 
And kneel before the Lord our Maker. 

1 will give thanks unto Thee, for I am fearfully and wonder- 

fully made. 

The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that 
have pleasure therein. 

Mutual recognition : the healing of the wounds of the 
Church : communion : the return of the Church to 



78 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

the feet of God : the return of the Bride to Christ : 
with men it is all impossible', but not with God. Faith- 
ful is He that caUed us, who also wiU do it — if we but 
yield ourselves to Him. 

Already many who believe in God are giving them- 
selves to the accompHshment of this end. The pre- 
parations for the World Conference on Faith and Order 
have been proceeding steadily since 1910. "It is 
desired to invite every autonomous Communion which 
confesses our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour to 
appoint a Commission to co-operate in arranging for 
and conducting the World Conference. Fifty-five 
Commissions have now been appointed, representing 
almost every part of the world, and numerous invita- 
tions are pending. Notable letters have been received 
from Cardinal Gasparri expressing the deep interest of 
the Pope and himself in the movement and promising 
their prayers. Two of the leading magazines of the 
Russian Church have published articles by eminent 
theologians urging the co-operation of the Russian 
Church. Similar articles had been published beiore 
the war by Protestant reviews in Germany, Finland, 
Hungary, Norway and Sweden. . . . The letters 
received both before and since the outbreak of the 
war show a wide and increasing interest in the move- 
ment and a clearer recognition that nothing but the 
visible unity of the Church which is the Body of Christ 
will suffice to estabUsh His law of peace " (Leaflet 
issued October, 1915). 

The existence since 1913 of the Constructive Quarterly, 
a Journal of the Faith, Work and Thought of Christen- 
dom, is another sign of the times. Here leading 
thinkers of every Church give of their best in con- 
structive statement of the convictions and experience 



VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 79 

of their own communion. " The immediate purpose 
of the Quarterly is to induce a better understanding 
and a truer sense of fellowship. Its final hope is the 
unity of the Family of God in the Body of Christ, where 
the hberty of the children of God will be attained." 

A French Roman Cathohc writer in this Quarterly ^ 
reviews a recent work of Pere Bainvel, a professor in 
the CathoHc Institute of Paris, on Outside the Church 
no Salvation, which, he declares, exactly reflects the 
common teaching. All through, in fact, the distin- 
guished professor incessantly leans upon declarations 
of the Sovereign Pontiff and the best theologians. 
The view of this representative Roman CathoHc 
theologian is as follows : " While men necessarily 
halt at the exterior of things, and can judge only 
after appearances, the divine sight sees what is : it 
sees hearts, it sees souls. . . . For God, souls are 
what they are within, what they are by intimate dis- 
position and by will. The outward act itself, while 
counting for much in His eyes, nevertheless counts 
only through the wiU and intention which animate it 
through whatever of heart and of soul is found in it. 
We understand then that to belong or not belong, by 
visible ties, by external communion to the Church of 
Christ is for Him a secondary matter, if we may so 
express it. The distinction of visible and invisible is 
vaHd only in relation to us ; to Him, aU is visible." 
The reviewer continues : " And this is why, in His 
eyes, they are already in the true Church of Christ, 
aU those souls unknown to us^whom circumstances 
stronger than'their will keep'f ar away from the ecclesi- 
astical body, but who in reality are joined to it by the 

1 Jean Riviere, Professor in the Grand Seminaire, Albi ; 
Constructive Quarterly, September, 1914. 



8o WHERE IS CHRIST? 

imperceptible bonds of the heart. Thus may we, 
with our Fathers in the Faith, repeat the ancient 
formula : ' Outside the Church no salvation.' For 
we know that beyond the narrow boundaries of the 
society which in this world holds Christ's faithful in 
one group, there stretches the vaster and fairer Church 
of souls. The contemplation of this unity, which is 
withheld from our mortal view, will no doubt be one of 
the joys of the heavenly Fatherland. Meanwhile we 
can only hasten by our prayers and our exertions the 
day when that ' building of Christ's Body ' shall be 
accomplished in which we shall all meet each other 
again ' in one and the same faith and in the knowledge 
of the Son of God,* where ' there shall be but one flock 
and one Shepherd.^ " 

"Underlying all our disunions," writes a Congre- 
gational Professor of Theology,^ " there is not only a 
common Christian experience which is basal and 
binding, but also a body of common conviction, a 
vital doctrinal consensus far richer than has ever been 
recognized. The Church at large has been blind to its 
own unity. We have not seen the forest because of 
the trees, and the groves. The Church has failed to 
realize that underneath all its doctrinal outgrowths, 
feeding the roots even of its tangles and underbrush, 
is the inexhaustible soil of a common vital spiritual 
experience, out of which have grown certain great 
essential convictions which, the more firmly and vitally 
they are realized, the more surely will they draw us 
toward one another." 

Mutual recognition is the keynote of all this new 

1 John Wright Buckham, D.D,, Professor of Christian 
Theology in the Pacific Theological Seminary. Constructive 
Quarterly, December, 1915, p. 824. 



VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 8i 

movement in the Churches, a movement which is 
thus seen to be vitally connected with the whole 
course of progress of m^odern thought and life, in 
that it takes facts as facts and honours them as such. 
The Student Christian Movement is probably the most 
notable and potent embodiment of the ideal. The 
ideal of a dead uniformity is in itself nearly dead. The 
ideal of unity in diversity is what we are all after : 
only we still fail to arrive. 

The present position of Christendom would be 
ridiculous if it were not so tragic. We have ceased to 
persecute one another. We read each other's books, 
and draw mental and spiritual hght and strength 
from teachers of other denominations. We even 
actively co-operate in some few moral and social 
enterprises. In short, we know that we are fellow- 
Christians. 

But the official Church — the Church as organized — 
cannot move : she is paralysed. In every proposal 
for conference or joint action there is the proviso that 
of course the several Churches are not committed to 
anything that may be done or decided. We unite in 
everything except the distinctive practices of our 
religion. Our Church systems make it seem that the 
nearer we get to Christ the further we get from one 
another. Which is absurd. 

The children are come to the birth and there is not 
strength to bring them forth. 

" Weep, dear Lord, above Thy bride low-lying ; 
Thy tears shall wake her frozen limbs to life and health 
again." 

In spite of all we know, the official Church remains 
powerless to move — until she comes under the direct 
control of Christ. 



CHAPTER VII 
THE WAY 

' T AM the Way." 

X We know Him as the Way for ourselves as 
individuals. But we have not yet recognized Him as 
the Way for human society. Human society has lost 
its way ; we do not know where we are going. Society 
has been compared to a rider on a runaway horse, 
named Civilization ; we are all inordinately proud 
of the strength of our steed, and of his ever-increasing 
speed. But what is the good of speed if it has no 
goal, and if all peace is lost in the progress ? 

But the ' ' Hound of Heaven ' ' pursues mankind no 
less than He pursues the individual : 

Nigh and nigh draws the chase, 

With unperturbed pace, 

Dehberate speed, majestic instancy, 

And past those noised Feet 

A Voice comes yet more fleet — 

" Lo ! naught contents thee, who content 'st not Me." 

And so at last we begin to understand that our 
trouble is God's trouble, and our pain His. May we 
stop and think. 

The root of the trouble is that the Church herself has 
lost the way, and therefore cannot lead mankind. 
Even at the oncoming of war she was speechless, she 
who is or was the Body of the Prince of Peace. 

82 



THE WAY 83 

Christ is the Way : only He can bring us to God ; 
only He can bring Christendom into line with God. 
And He can do so only as Christendom recognizes 
Him and yields to Him : recognizes Him in God ; in 
every one as that which links or would link us together, 
taking us out of the little self into the larger self. 

The Church has lost the way because she has for- 
gotten how to grow up. For the way is the Way of 
Life ; and life involves growth. At the beginning she 
attained to a complete Hfe, the records of which must 
remain a pattern and inspiration for us in our feeble 
second childhood of religion. She started growing up 
in all things unto Him, which is the Head, even Christ. 
But now her tragedy is arrested growth : she has 
stuck : she cannot get there. The world looks wonder- 
ingly at her vast powers, cabined and confined. 

Now this arrest of growth in rehgion is a pheno- 
menon whose causes and effects have become fairly 
obvious. What has happened ? The Church began 
with Christ. Men found in Him the fulfilment of past 
ideals, the attainment of present reahty,^the assurance 
of a complete future. But the Present was the dominant 
factor in their consciousness — ^the present Christ, Who 
never failed them. This is the essential mystical 
element of adult reHgion. So long as the Church 
retained the sense of Christ's presence and remained 
under His direct control, she knit in one rich life all 
those elements of religion which at other times have 
been sundered — the corporate loyalty, the intellectual 
vigour, the devotion of personal faith. Later, the 
Past eclipsed the Present. Christians ceased to 
cohere in Christ. Institutionalism prevailed, with 
rationaHsm ranged against it as hereditary foe. 

This eclipse of the present is what always happens 



84 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

if we lose or think we have lost our leader or lover. 
In the present blank we treasure the old words and 
cHng to the old ways of doing things ; the past is 
sacred ; innovation is apt to look like sacrilege. 

Christ founded the Church to save us from this 
pathetic malady. For understanding of this malady, 
this arrest of growth, we again draw help from Von 
Hiigel's analysis of rehgion into the three elements : 
institutional, rational, mystical. The corporate 
Church no less than the individual Christian needs the 
co-ordination of all three reHgious forces. In Church 
history, as in individual hfe, the three elements of 
reUgion are present throughout ; but only in the full- 
grown hfe are they properly co-ordinated. Except 
in the golden Apostohc Age we are apt to find each of 
them dominant at different stages of Church history : 
rehgion becomes one-sided, either as traditional, or as 
rationahst, or as subjective. The primary stage, 
corresponding to childhood of the individual, is that 
in which the Christian community goes on happily in 
entire satisfaction with its own ideas and its own 
methods and its own plans. It is intensely conserva- 
tive, attaching Divine sanction to all it has inherited 
from the past. This is the stage of keen denominational 
hfe, in which the interests of the denomination are 
supreme, and its ordinances are regarded as of uni- 
versal obhgation. Throughout Christendom we are 
aU famihar with these phenomena, and with this 
experience ; with making such claim ourselves, and 
resenting it when made by others. This institutional 
element of rehgion is more particularly characteristic 
of Church officials and Church councils. We are 
aware of its action in ourselves in those capacities : 
there too often we are other menTthan^'when we kneel 



THE WAY 85 

alone with God, other men than we are in ordinary 
intercourse with our friends. It causes the character- 
istic weakness of episcopacy, which but for this lop- 
sidedness might well be recognized by all as part of 
the Divine plan for Church order. A religion that 
makes a particular tradition determinative of its 
action prejudices to the modern mind its claim to 
Divine sanction. For to modern men as to the first 
Christians what is primary in religion is not the Then 
and There but the Now and Here of God's relation 
to men. 

The secondary stage of Church hfe is that of intel- 
lectual and critical activity. This too is conspicuous 
in these days.^ It is essentially individualist — each 
man following the truth whithersoever it seems to 
lead him : yet it becomes characteristic of a society 
of individualists (for they cannot be purely indivi- 
dualist). So we have that mass of theological criticism 
and speculation which owns no allegiance to the organ- 
ized Christian community and cuts itself off from the 
traditions and authority of past thought. The Church 
thus seems for some time past to have been held up 
at the crisis which Von Hiigel well describes as it 
occurs in the individual Hfe : ** The transition from the 
child's rehgion, so simply naive and unconscious, so 
tied to time and place and particular persons and 
things, so predominantly traditional and historical, 
institutional and external, to the right and normal 
type of a young man's religion, is as necessary as it is 
perilous. The transition is necessary. For all the 
rest of him is growing — ^body and soul are growing in 
clamorous complexity in every direction : how then 

* Cf. above, chap. IV. 



86 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

can the deepest part of his nature, his reUgion, not 
require to grow and develop also ? " (Von Hiigel asks 
this question as to the individual youth : we can ask it 
likewise as regards Christian society), " and how can 
it permeate and purify all the rest, how can it remain 
and increasingly become ' the secret st)urce of all his 
seeing,' of his productiveness and courage and unifica- 
tion, unless it continually equals and exceeds all other 
interests within the living man " (or society) " by its 
own persistent vitahty, its rich and infinite variety, 
its subtle, ever-fresh attraction and inexhaustible 
resourcefulness and power ? But the crisis is peri- 
lous. For he will be greatly tempted either to cling 
exclusively to his existing, all but simply institu- 
tional, external position, and to fight and elude all 
approaches to its reasoned, intellectual apprehension 
and systematization ; and in this case his religion 
will tend to contract and shrivel up, and to become a 
something simply alongside of other things in his life. 
Or he will feel strongly pressed to let the individual 
intellect simply supplant the institutional, in which 
case his religion will grow hard and shallow, and will 
tend to disappear altogether." ^ 

Look at Christendom to-day. Is not its condition 
correctly diagnosed in the passage thus quoted ? Has 
not religion become " a something simply alongside 
of other things in our Hfe " ? Or over large tracts of 
" enlightened " society does it not '' tend to disappear 
altogether " ? It was an immature Church that had to 
face the oncoming of war : as a wondering child, or 
an argumentative youth, not the man full-grown in 
the stature of Christ. 

J ' 1 Vol. i., pp. 54, 55. 



THE WAY 87 

Christendom indeed is not merely the scene of 
conflict between institutionahsm and rationaHsm, or 
of isolated development of one or the other of these 
elements. It contains much more than the assertive 
simplicity of childhood, or the crises and conflicts 
and dogmatism of 3^outh ; it contains the religion of 
mature life. Ever5rsvhere are those who through the 
institution and through the reasoning have followed 
on to know the Lord. " Here religion is rather felt 
than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather 
than analysed, is action and power, rather than either 
external fact or intellectual verification." 

But it is individuals of Christendom that have 
reached this adult reUgion, not Christendom as an 
organized whole, not the Church or Churches as such. 
Christendom is full of grown-up Christians, but itself 
fails to grow up. This is the deepest tragedy of the 
present war. Christian men in all these nations 
through the very passion of their loyalty, through the 
utterness of their self-surrender, are ranged against 
one another. Because they are wiUing to die, they 
are obliged to kill. Because they are devoted to 
truth and honour, they are involved in breaches of the 
fundamental rules of even schoolboy honour. The 
horror of it all is voiced by writer after writer from 
the trenches, willing to go on in absolute self-sacrifice, 
but loathing the whole thing utterly. 

Here again we are up against the contrast between 
personal religion and the corporate expression of it. 
Christianity as the reHgion of loyalty produces loyal 
men : but the Church has not shown them clearly 
what loyalty really is : and therefore loyalty, instead 
of uniting, divides. For in every part of human life, 
so long as we are content with superficial views, we 



88 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

find ourselves mutually opposed ; when we get to the 
deep views, we find ourselves at one. We attain to 
unity in diversity. 

Loyalty in every land is a spiritual force attaching 
itself to material objects. We need but call to mind 
what the national flag means to us. The flag is a 
focus of all that attachment to the things of home and 
country. But behind the things lies the Hfe that they 
embody and express, it is to that larger life that 
loyalty devotes our individual lesser lives. Many hold 
that loyalty attaches ultimately to the nation or the 
State. But we must remember that it takes other 
forms than that of patriotism. Before the war, 
parties and classes were taking the place of the nation, 
and men and women were throwing themselves into 
those narrower causes with hardly less devotion than 
they now give to the national cause. Many of us will 
remember our early loyalties to School or House, and 
our inability to feel that any rival attachment could 
be as good and real as ours. Loyalty, then, is an 
ultimate factor of our spiritual life — spiritual as tran- 
scending time and space. It belongs to the first of 
those three essential elements of religion, the institu- 
tional, the rational and the mystical. It binds us 
corporately to our institutions. But we must acknow- 
ledge that though an ultimate factor of rehgion it 
is not ultimate in its ordinary forms, as attached to 
this or that object, though at the time we think (or 
rather feel) that it is. There are many excellent 
instances of party transference, of religious transfer- 
ence, of naturalization. The man brought up in 
loyalty to one community lives later as a loyal member 
of another. This is to say that no State, no party, no 
Church, as standing in distinction or opposition to 



THE WAY 89 

another, has the ultimate claim to man's allegiance.^ 
Only Christ has that. Christ alone is the absolute 
society. No other is cathohc. The tragedy of Chris- 
tians in this war is therefore due to the Church's over- 
emphasis on the institutional side of reHgion : she has 
given men loyalty, but has not given them the present 
Christ to claim that loyalty. The Church has hitherto 
failed to present Christ as the ultimate Corporate 
PersonaUty, to hold together all His members for ever. 
So we come back to the point that corporate religion 
is incomplete, inadequate to human hfe and need, if 
either the institutional or the rational element is 
allowed to be dominant. Through the institution and 
through the reasoning the Church too, Hke the in- 
dividual, must follow on to know the Lord. She 
cannot attain to full-grown life unless the mystical 
element is dominant : not exclusive, but inclusive 
of the other two elements of reHgion. This does not 
mean that individual " mystics " must be called upon 
to govern : it means that the whole body must be 
mystical. There is no question here of subjective 
mysticism, "laying such an emphasis on the relation 
of the individual soul to God as to obscure its relation 
to men and to nature." We are dealing with the 
development of corporate religion, claiming that in 
the Church the Presence of Christ must be recognized 
and acknowledged as determinative of action and of 
thought (not merely of religious emotion). The 
present state of Church hfe would seem to imply that 
He is an absentee, or else lacking in wisdom, or prac- 
tical abihty, or adaptabihty to new needs and great 
crises. Such seems to be our unconscious assumption 
when we allow either the institutional or the rational 
1 So Edith Cavell has shown us. " Patriotism is not enough." 



90 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

element of religion to dominate the whole : as though 
Christ were something in the past, or something to be 
reasoned about, and not the present Lord of all our 
Hfe. 

For this question of the three elements of religion is 
really the question of the Divinity of Christ. Mysticism 
is the recognition of the Person of Christ, the acknow- 
ledgment of His Presence as God : for God is He 
Who cannot be absent unless I put Him from me. The 
institutional and the rational elements of religion 
are therefore failures if they are not crowned by the 
mystical, for they just stop short of Christ. Institu- 
tionalism grounds us in good habits ; rationahsm gives 
us clear thought and intelligent grasp of our situation ; 
but it is mysticism that launches us out for service, 
in all the activities of Love. Neither habits nor 
thoughts make up a full life ; Love alone does that. 
Worshippers of Christ are worshippers of Love. Ser- 
vants of Christ are servants of Love. To look back 
on the course of our discussion to this point, we recall 
Christ's promise to be with us for ever ; we remember 
the New Testament experience of Him, creating new 
men and building them up into one Body in Love, 
which is Himself; for they found Him by giving 
themselves up to Love ; and we reaUze that through 
the Christian centuries the real life of the Church has 
been the knowledge of Christ in God, which is the 
knowledge of Love in God. All this means that Love 
is alive and intelligent and capable : not a mere emo- 
tion, but the life and intelligence and capacity of the 
eternal God : not my or your caprice, but the rational 
principle and constant power of the universe : claim- 
ing our trust. 

Now as being myself an Anglican, I feel called upon 



THE WAY 91 

to realize that the Anghcan Communion is to a pecu- 
liar degree dominated by institutionalism, and thereby 
restrained from the full life of faith. ^ In our relations 
with other Christians our constant claim is that we 
are in the true Hne of succession from the past. Ours 
is " the historical faith." The " Lambeth Ouadri- 
lateral," defining the points essential to the Anglican 
Communion in any projects of reunion, is a statement 
of the great things from the past which we must not 
let go (Orders, Sacraments, Scriptures, Creeds). In 
our practical ministry we are dominated by this con- 
ception of a historic institution of v/hose inherited 
treasures we are the responsible stewards. We are 
apt to treat the Prayer Book as among the ultimate 
data of religion. From it we take God's message for 
the day ; on it we base complete schemes of religious 
instruction. Our controversies are not about the 
meaning and methods of love, but about our tradi- 
tions of doctrines and ceremonies. For the sake of 
these we lapse from love. 

Responsibility for the present failure of Christen- 
dom lies with all of us who hold executive or doctrinal 
authority in this or other branches of the Church. 
We are responsible for the fact that in actual practice, 
in contrast with her ideal character, the Church so 
largely reflects the minds of men and not the mind 
of Christ. Whoever may have been responsible in the 
past, it is we who are responsible to-day — we who till 

1 " Fundamentally our religion consists in preserving a 
tradition," writes Dr. Headlam, and that in an article admir- 
ably bringing out the need of " a revived intellectual life, 
which wiil mean the application of thought to everything 
instead of acquiescence in unmeaning custom or bad tradi- 
tions." Church Quarterly Review, October, 1916 : "Where 
does the Defect of the Church Lie ? " 



92 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

now have accepted the situation and smugly Hved our 
lives and exercised our ministry within its set con- 
ditions. We who stand professionally for the tradi- 
tional doctrines and ceremonies are responsible for 
the Church's one-sided development, for her failure 
to attain the full stature. If Christ at the outset 
wiUed us to be perfect, have not we. His representa- 
tives, set at naught His commandment by our tradi- 
tion — ^that is, by our over-emphasis on the tradition 
as tradition, as linking us to a past rather than to 
the present ? Lop-sidedness is not perfection. 

The unfairness of our ministry may in some respects 
have struck us. For why should our professions and 
emplojnnents be held sacred, and those of laymen be 
set down as secular ? Why should we have much 
more constant access to means of grace than others 
can have ? ^ But one particular unfairness is apt 
to escape our attention. In the ministry of con- 
version we caU on men and women to break the habits 
of a hfetime, and to cast themselves in Christ's ilhmit- 
able power to re-create them : and we know that they 
and He can do it. But we do not often think of 
making such a plunge ourselves : we do not contem- 
plate a revolution in our own personal habits or modes 
of speech and thought. We have stamped these as 
sacred. Such heroism of self-surrender to the Uving 
Christ, of self-committal to the untrod Way, we only 
expect of comparative beginners. As for ourselves, 
we have settled down — settled to our own concep- 
tions of rehgion, to our regular enjoyment of what 
appeals to us. 

1 Cf. Ezekiel xxxiv. We may disclaim the intention but 
we can hardly deny the fact of this broad distinction between 
clerical and lay life. 



THE WAY 93 

Christ did not say '' Stand with Me," but '' Follow 
Me," and His call to every generation is the same — 
the same yesterday, to-day and for ever. He is nearer 
to us, not farther, than He was to those fishermen 
in Galilee ; but we seem slower to forsake our boats 
and nets than they were. He means us through His 
all-embracing, all-reconciHng presence to do greater 
works than ever He did as an individual there — ^not 
to spend our time and energy in arguing about those 
less great works of His, whether and how they were 
ever done. 

We know how to trust Him with the part — our own 
personal life : why do we not trust Him with the whole ? 
If I know Him adequate for myself, why do I count 
Him inadequate for the persons and causes for \yhich 
I am responsible ? Why do we stake all on the main- 
tenance of a tradition or the victory of a party ? 

As the Church's commissioned officials we feel 
responsible for the Church's heritage, and are disposed 
to take its maintenance into our own hands. Some 
insist that all must walk in the old ways ; others insist 
that the memory of old persecutions must be kept 
fresh : seemingly ignorant of the Life that is always 
moving on, so that no to-day is the same as yesterday, 
save only as Hnked up in Him Who is the Life of all. 
Our fatal vice is this anxiety about our inheritance; 
in other words, our want of faith. Our very faith- 
fulness is faithless. 

We need not be so anxious about our inheritance, 
and if we need not, we ought not. For we really can 
safely leave it to God, to the nature with which He has 
endowed us all. We have already seen that denomina- 
tional self-assertion is uncalled-for, because the de- 
nominational inheritance is an ineradicable part of 



94 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

our spiritual make-up. And we have the present 
facts of patriotism : in every land we are in the grip 
of this mighty force ; we need not anxiously grip it. 
An illustration of these latent forces in modern man 
is presented by the glorious efficiency of British 
soldiers, men from offices and factories and fields, who 
were supposed to be unfitted for war because never 
trained to it, but have been found in a few months 
equal to the best. There are mighty forces in us all 
which the Church has not yet mobilized. 

It is not for us to be anxious about preserving these 
forces of our human nature. But it is for us to under- 
stand and control them. We can only rise above 
facts, and use them, by understanding them. Let us 
therefore understand our own and others' loyalty. 

Understand it ; i.e. understand Him. " / am the 
Way." That which seems an impersonal force, mov- 
ing us all on resistlessly, welding us together in our 
corporate loyalties, is He, after all. To agree in 
acknowledging this would be to rise to adult rehgion, 
to bring the Church into hne with God, into hne with 
the experience of us all. 

To this end we clergy and ministers must repent and 
alter. We must truly lead the way. The future is 
in our hands. 

We are not asked to disown our own convictions and 
experiences of grace ; but mutually to own the con- 
victions and experiences of others. For example, I 
for my part shall ever treasure as most sacred the 
times when I prepared boys for baptism, and the 
Ember-tide retreats of candidates for ordination : 
together with the constant sacramental grace which 
I share with all my fellow-communicants. Such 
solemn tinies afforded by the institutions of the 



THE WAY 95 

Church have brought us right inside the workings of 
God. There can be no disillusionment about them. 
But we want to go on to proclaim that there is no place 
for any disillusionments in Christianity. 

Jesus lives. Our hearts know well 
Naught from us His love can sever. 

Really we all have this faith, expressed in words and 
forms that we love, if we will but use it.^ 

There is no question of giving up the forms endeared 
to us by long experience. Mysticism does not mean 
scrapping our institutions. The mystical element 
must include those other elements which we now allow 
to dominate our rehgion ; but it must now dominate 
them. There must of necessity be estabHshed forms 
and ceremonies {a) for the sake of children in years, 
(b) for the sake of children in the faith, (c) lor the 
sake of us all : for to the end of our days we all need 
outward order and system if we are to have stability 
of inward life, and if we are to have social cohesion in 
a common loyalty, and if we are to build in ordered 
progress on the past. (And we have already noted 
that we cannot eliminate this institutional element 
even if we would.) Also there will be perpetual need 
for intellectual vigour and candour, the unfettered 
use of all our mental powers, in the cause of truth and 
honesty. But above all and in all and through all 
there must be direct acknowledgment of Christ present 
in our God. 

The doctrine of Christ's Divinity is the pecuHar 
boast of Christendom ; that it appHes to all life is a 
famihar truth, famiHar as a theory or an ideal : it is 

the complete practice of it that seems so hard to arrive y 

'■•'•■■..^ 

^ Cf, Swete, The Ascended Christ, pp. 162, 163. 



7 



1^ 



96 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

at. Yet, maybe, it will not prove so hard if we reaUy 
turn to Him for that appHcation to all life. To do so, 
we must of necessity rise above our old institutional 
ruts : not necessarily to leave them, but at least to see 
that they are ruts, and not the whole road. Institu- 
tionahsm means being inside the institution ; ration- 
aHsm means rising above it to view it from outside 
and in relation to other institutions ; mysticism means 
recognizing God present and working in it and in them 
and in yourself who thus view His processes. Now 
though the institutional aspect of AngUcanism is what 
seems to loom largest before the world, it is not really 
the riiost important aspect. If we re-focus our view 
of reHgious facts, we may see that a far bigger thing 
in AngHcanism than the historical elements defined 
in the Lambeth Quadrilateral is the essential character 
of the Church as declared in the EncycHcal Letter of 
the Lambeth Conference of 1908. It is the character 
of Service. " How the Church, in the Name of 
Him to whom aU men are dear, may best serve for 
the true welfare and happiness of all — this, through 
aU the diversity of detail, has been the constant theme 
of our study and discussion. ... At the heart of 
that conception of the Church which Christ our Lord 
has taught us is the thought of Service. For He came, 
'not to be ministered unto, but to minister,' and a 
Church is set to portray and represent Him amongst 
men ; to keep the vision of Him, of His work, His 
ways, before the eyes of men. Therefore the Church 
must take for its own this central note of His purpose 
and His mission ; the Church will be true to its calling 
in proportion as it can say to the world, by word and 
deed, by what it refuses and by what it claims : ' I 
come, not to be ministered unto, but to minister ' ; 



THE WAY 97 

and it must be feared that the Church's forget fulness 
of this, its obscuring or effacing of this central charac- 
teristic, has at times disastrously hindered the world 
from recognizing the true nature and office of the 
Church. The power to witness to Christ depends on 
being like Him. Men will always learn of Christ 
from those whom they see living with Christlike sim- 
plicity for their sake." ^ And as to our connection 
with the past, this Encyclical of our Bishops states 
that " we reahze that the links v/hich bind us to that 
historic past are not fetters upon the free and enter- 
prising spirit which is essential to progress. We be- 
long to a Church which ... is the Church of free men, 
educating them into a knowledge of the liberty where- 
with Christ hath made them free." " We must set 
before us the Church of Christ as He would have it, 
one spirit and one body, enriched with all those ele- 
ments of divine truth which the separated communities 
of Christians now emphasize severally, strengthened 
by the interaction of all the gifts and graces which our 
divisions now hold asunder, filled with all the fulness 
of God. W^e dare not, in the name of peace, barter 
away those precious things of which we have been 
made stewards. Neither can we wish others to be 
unfaithful to trusts which they hold no less sacred. 
We must fix our eyes on the Church of the future, 
which is to be adorned with all the precious things, 
both theirs and ours. We must constantly desire 
not compromise but comprehension, not uniformity 
but unity." 

Such was the vision of our two hundred and forty- 
two Bishops in 1908. But Anglicanism remains out- 

^ Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, 19CH 
(S.P.C.K.), pp. 23, 24, 



y 



98 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

wardly as before, tied up in institutionalism. Our 
leaders would lead us out into the Way of God, but 
they have not been able. We are all alike : when we 

j meet in the presence of God, Christ shows us the Way ; 

^ but then we disperse and relapse into hugging our own 
inheritance. 

The great usurpation continues to displace Christ 
from His rightful sovereignty in the Church. We are 
the usurpers, so long as we conduct the affairs of the 
Church according to our own stereotyped ideas, and 
refuse to give ourselves up to Love. We are usurpers 
if we behave as present representatives of an absent 
Christ. Personal repentance of us all is the only way 
out. We have to apply to our official Hfe the practice of 
our private devotion. " We have erred and strayed 
from Thy ways Hke lost sheep. W^e have followed too 
jQuch the devices and desires of our own hearts." 

(^ " O Love, I give myself to Thee 
Thine ever, only Thine to be." 

Then God can work, and will work, as He is working 
already when and where we aUow Him. CaU to wit- 
ness aU those who have experience of the corporate 
vitahty and efficacy of such conferences as the Pan- 
AngHcan, or those held at Swanwick. " There was no 
faintness of heart in facing great questions, and no 
narrowness of mind in deahng with them. The 
genuine wish to work together swept away all thoughts 
of partizanship, and brought instead the reaUty of 
mutual understanding. Minds and hearts were lifted 
up on high, and as from the Mount of God men saw 
visions of Service." This testimony of the Lambeth 
Encychcal Letter to the experience of the Pan-Angli- 
can Congress voices the experience of multitudes of 



THE WAY 99 

us, at that and at other conferences. What is often 
spoken of as the " atmosphere " of the Edinburgh v 
Missionary Conference, or of Swanwick, or of many 
Student Movement Conferences, is an experience of this \ 
mighty power of God in Christ, and a revelation of the \ 
Way for us to walk in. For there men and women 
meeting are brought into a unity that they had not 
dreamt of. There the biggest problems are tackled, 
and the Way begins to open out through the poHtical \ 
or ecclesiastical tangles which have held us up. In all 
such experiences we need to get beyond the thought , 
of the atmosphere to the thought of Christ, from the I 
impersonal to the personal. For it is He. We are 
not merely enjoying an atmosphere which we create i 
by warmth of numbers. He is the New Creator, not 
we. We are out on the hill-tops, breathing the fresh 
breezes of heaven. We plunge into the fresh springs 
of the water of Hfe. It is not a matter of our numbers. 
Throughout Christendom, countless experiences of the 
" two or three " prove the truth of Christ. He is the 
Way, when men will meet. That it is He and not we 
is being realized most vividly and most completely 
in the Fellowships of Silence, where through union in ^ 
silence before God people are led into a unity of life 
transcending any they could attain by their own 
efforts. ^ We leave the strife of tongues and find that 
in His WiU is our peace : ''to them that believe, both 
Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the 
wisdom of God." 

For Christ is at work among us, and not only *' here " 
or " there." He is in God, and therefore in the world ; 
not Hmited to this or that Church ; not limited to 

^ Cf. The Fellowship of Silence ; also Fruits of Silence, ] 
by Cyril Hepher, ' 



lOo WHERE IS CHRIST? 

ecclesiatical organizations. He is working in men as 
men, in aU the nations, preparing them for allegiance 
to His Kingdom. We are finding that conference 
works better than conflict. In our own country in 
particular we can ahready note " the rapid growth of 
reasonable methods in poHtics. More and more 
questions are settled by general agreement and with- 
out the miHtan.' pomp of a lull-dress debate." " Pro- 
gress is in theory, and has been in fact, the steady 
development of the principle of co-operation and 
fellowship as compared ^rith that of competition and 
antagonism. The acceptance of Majority-rule, as if 
the will of the majority were the wiU of aU, is a step 
in that direction ; but still more important and sig- 
nificant is the gradual substitution of settlement by 
discussion in committees for the ofiicial party-combats 
in the House of Commons. Throughout the industrial 
and commercial world the same tendency is obser^^able. 
If our labour disputes are nowadays more serious than 
in the past, it is precisely because both labour and 
capital are becoming more co-operative and less com- 
petitive in themselves." ^ 

So Christ is working His purpose out. And if we 
further look out upon the British Empire and con- 

^ W. Temple on " The Xature of Government," in Some 
Aspects of the Woman's Movement, pp. 153, 154 (Student 
Christian Movement, 1915). To any persons still prepossessed 
by the idea of party government, a study of recent poHtics in 
China may be commended. In this RepubUc the imitation 
of our Western part^- system ruined the first attempt at parlia- 
m.entar\- government and now almost stultifies the second. 
That which absorbs the attention and efforts of poHticians 
is the formation and conflicts of parties, while great social and 
economic miseries of the people go unregarded. Is it the 
real England that is thus being followed ? Is this what 
England's political development means to the world ? 



THE WAY loi 

sider, as in these days we must needs consider, what it 
is for, we may dare to find here too that Christ is 
working out His original purposes. " Our Empire 
rests on hberty ; but this is also the root principle, on 
the human side, of that Kingdom which Christ came to 
proclaim and found. At the beginning of His Minis- 
try our Lord repudiated the only ways that there are 
of controUing men's conduct otherwise than by secur- 
ing the free allegiance of their hearts and wills. He 
would not use His power for the satisfaction of creature 
comforts ; He would not force men into His obedi- 
ence ; and He would not overpower their wills with 
irresistible evidence. He would not, that is to say, 
either bribe them or coerce them, or convince them 
against their will. But He would live before men 
the Hfe of Perfect Love and die before them a death of 
Perfect Love, so drawing them to Himself. In other 
words. His Kingdom on its human side rests on free- 
dom. There is, then, a real affinity in root principle 
between what we call the British Empire and the 
Kingdom of God itself. Our Empire has many great 
and glaring faults which need to be purged away, 
but it is the first great world structure which has 
rested on this spiritual foundation. It is ready, as 
no other Empire has been, for the consecrating touch. ' ' ^ 
The process of the British Empire (may we not say, 
the process which is the British Empire) is that of the 
larger WiU to which the latter wills submit while they 
contribute. It is this process which gives us " the 
problem of the Commonwealth." " Our British pro- 
blem is a bigger, more comphcated one than any the 
Caesars had to deal with, for the ideal that animates 

1 The Call of the Kingdom, by W. Temple (National 
Mission Pamphlets, A) . 



102 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

and justifies our ImperiaHsm is that of progressive 
self-government. ' ' 

These problems, whether of Church or of State, are 
the problems of human relationship. What is hap- 
pening in this modern world of ours is the discovery 
t6at we are members of a larger entity, that our life 
is but part of a larger hfe. We have not yet quite 
found out what that Whole is to which we belong, but 
we shall soon find out that it is Christ — He whose 
service is perfect freedom, He in Whom we all are one. 
If I speak specially of the British Empire, it is not to 
Hmit Christ thereto, but because it is my part as an 
Enghshman to understand my own national life. 
Others will know of Christ's working in their national 
Ufe towards the same end. 

'' The Lord has opened the windows of Heaven, and 
has poured out the Spirit of fellowship upon us. And 
that Spirit is amongst us, patiently waiting until we 
have tried all other means, and are willing to cast 
ourselves upon His help. When we are ready to do 
this we shall discover that He can work in ways that 
are beyond our present comprehension. It will be 
the next Church movement. The call is to go forward. 
We may be certain that a special reward awaits those 
who have the faith and the daring to obey." ^ 

This will be to bring the Church into hne with the 
great world forces which are the mighty working of 
God ; it will be to bring those forces into the Church. 
It has been well said that the problem before us is not 
that of free Churches in a free State, but of free States 
in a free Church. ^ "By its light will the nations walk ; 

1 Christ and the Church,'byK.^.^6bm.soTi (S.P.C.K., 1915). 

2 Church and Nation, by W. Temple (Macmillan, 1915), p. 
52. 



THE WAY 103 

and into it will the kings of earth bring their glories ; 
the gates of it will never be shut by day, and night 
there shall be none." 

When we all make this new plunge into fellowship, 
the Church will be no congeries of petty groups, for the 
fellowship is the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, and 
the new Kfe will be one of participation in the hfe of 
God. Our individual plunge will not imperil the 
cathohcity of the Church ; she will at last be true to 
her character as the Body of Christ, ''welded together 
and compacted by every joint with which it is sup- 
phed, the due activity of each part enabUng the Body to 
grow and build itself up in love " (Eph. iv. 16). The 
Church in each place will be the CathoHc Church in 
miniature.^ The Christians in each place will be one 
Body, knowing that wherever men are gathered in 
His Name, there is He in the midst of them. Then it 
will be seen that Church order is the order of lovq, the 
order of mutual honour, of honour shown to our con- 
temporaries, but also to our forefathers and theirs : 
with a tender respect for all that we have inherited 
from them, seeing that they with us are alive in Christ. 
The facts of the actual situation in every place must be 
determinative of action, because we recognize facts as 
God's acts ; and because the whole modus operandi 
of love is to act on the present facts without restraint 
of prejudice or fear. This does not mean parochiahsm, 
not that type of Congregationahsm which has found 



^ See two articles by Rev, Herbert Kelly in The East and 
the West, April and July, 1916, on " The Pattern of a Mis- 
sionary Church" and "The Pattern of the Early Church; 
the Formation of the Ministry " (S.P.C.K.). Cf, Bishop 
Walpole, Vital Religion, p. 170, on local variations in forms of 
worship. 



104 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

out its o^vn inadequacy.^ For all such narrowness 
rests on blindness to facts, or ignorance of what 
others are doing or have done, or of our vital depend- 
ence on others, especially on those who are leaders of 
thought. 

The Church will thus attain to that unity in diversity 
which is the essence of fellowship, as it is the essence 
of Christ's reUgion. Then rehgion will " continually 
equal and exceed all other interests by its own per- 
sistent vitality, its rich and infinite variety, its subtle, 
ever-fresh attraction and inexhaustible resourcefulness 
and power." ^ 

Thus freed by Christ, because ruled by Him, the 
Church will give us •" the moral alternative for w^ar." 
" When nations come to understand the great Chris- 
tian adventure, and learn that in pursuing it they will 
find their own highest life, then war will drop out of 
the world's life just as swords are dropped by men 
who want to paint, or make music, or tend gardens, or 
wTite poerty. It will seem so mean an interruption 
to life's real business that men will refuse to debase 
themselves with it. Then, indeed, there wiU be peace in 
the smaller sense, but only because the world will be 
full of the noise and the joy of the warfare of God. It 
is Christ and Christ alone who can offer to men some- 
thing so great that for the sake of it they will forego 
the joy of battle." ^ 

The Church will then show that absolute respect 
for personaHty which is essential to the character of 
Christ and is the'goal of all self-discipHne, the ideal of 

^ See " Congregationalism and its Ideal." Meredith Davies. 
Constructive Quarterly, September, 191 5. 

* Von Hiigel: cf. above, p. 56. 

3 Papers for War Time, No. 27, The Only Alternatine to 
War, A. Herbert Gray. Oxford IJniversity Press, 1915. 



THE WAY 105 

modern education, the true motive of all popular 
movements. " There is nothing so exquisitely and 
increasingly sensitive as the Christ fellowship or body, ' ' 
writes Bishop Brent. Utter respect for the individual 
is the antithesis of that impersonal treatment of 
people in the mass which is the ground of all partizan- 
ships and wars. This impersonal treatment of people 
in the mass is what confuses the anti-pacifist argument 
about defending the attacked, and muddles our minds 
on the subject of violence. Violent resistance to 
brutal assault on the weak is one thing when you mean 
the actual persons concerned ; quite another when 
you lump together myriads of guilty and innocent 
under some imaginary general category which does 
not fit the facts of life. The partizan view of men in 
masses is un-Christian because it is untrue. There 
is no room for party organization in the Cathohc 
Church of Christ. 

In the CathoHc Church of Christ the riddle of death 
will be solved, not merely doctrinally, but practically. 
For when the Church comes back to the way of love 
we shall know what the Communion of Saints means. 
We shall be quiet enough, unhurried enough, sensitive 
enough, to reahze our spiritual environment ; we shall 
have time and attention for our friends whom we set 
down as " lost." We shall perceive that *' death sets 
powers free so that presence may be extended. This 
is not a speculative assertion, but a fact of history 
capped by the common experience of men of to-day. 
. . . The presence not only abides, but continues to \ 
operate here in a refined manner. It is not that it 
alters its mode of operation, but that we who remain 
perceive that which was hitherto only partially appar- 
ent to us. We often attribute influence to the in- 



io6 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

cidentals of personality instead of to the eternized 
personality which death unveils/* ^ 

By throwing ourselves on Christ we can enter into 
that communion of saints ; we can enter into the full 
Hfe and powers of the Church which is His Body. 
Why let our institutions or our prejudices hold us 
back from this glorious consummation for which the 
whole world waits ? 

St. Paul had vision to see that the Jewish Law had 
served as a tutor to bring Israel to Christ. To-day we 
should hkewise see that all the various systems of the 
Churches have now made it possible for us aU to enter 
into the hberty of fellowship in Christ. We have 
been " under guardians and stewards until the time 
appointed of the Father " : now'He calls us to enter 
on the privileges of sons. 

That, we must repeat, does not mean giving up our 
sacraments. That would be contrary to the whole 
argument of this book. It would certainly be contrary 
to the meaning and practice of St. Paul. Sonship to 
him meant enrichment, not impoverishment, " All 
things are yours." As sons we are freed from pre- 
judice, our sympathies are broadened, we can be " all 
things to all men," true to ourselves, but able to enter 
into the life of others. I have never yet communicated 
except as an AngHcan, under the AngHcan rite : but 
why should I not, under this reaUzation of sonship ? 

What becomes of the sacraments if we relax our 
disciplinary restrictions ? They become what they 
are, not memorials of the Dead, but actions of the 
Living ; not symbols of an absent Christ, but tokens of 
His Presence ; just as with other friends the hand- 

* Bishop Brent, Presence. 



THE WAY 107 

shake or the kiss are an acknowledgment of present 
union. ^ 

Christian baptism was originally a real entry into 
a real life, a transition from one society into another, 
actual incorporation into the Christian fellowship. 
Later it became a rite in itself, as appHed to an 
individual apart from any real entry into fellowship. 
If we restore the Christian fellowship, the sacraments 
will again be matters not of theological speculation, 
but of immediate fact ; the focus of all social effort. 

The constant peril of religion is petrifaction ; the 
substitution of one legahsm for another, a Christian 
law for a Judaic, a Protestant for a CathoHc. Psy- 
chology, Hke other sciences, dissolves the arbitrary 
distinctions, and reveals the real processes of Hfe and 
death, whether operative through circumcision, or 
through baptism, or through any other rite. But 
that impartiaUty of science is what we rehgious people 
so grievously lack. St. Paul's call to sonship thus 
comes home to us to-day, recalling us to personal 
relationship to the Father of all. 

" My one thought is, by forgetting what hes behind 
me and straining to what hes before me, to press on 
to the goal for the prize of God's high call in Christ 
Jesus. For all those of our number who are mature 
this must be the point of view ; God will reveal that 
to any of you who look at things differently. Only 
we must let our steps be guided by such truth as we 
have attained. "2 

" I am the Way." The Way is well known in the 

1 " Our hope rests not on Institutions, nor on Sacraments, 
but on a Person, and He is very near." The Dean of West- 
minster, in the National Mission, November, 1916. 

2 Phil. iii. 13-16. 



io8 WHERE IS CHRIST? 

Church, though the Church does not yet walk in it. It 
is itie vision of aU our prophets, though obscured by 
all us priests. Our prophets indeed have most of them 
been also priests : there need be no antagonism or 
antipathy between these two functions of the Church's 
ministry : but it is as prophets, interpreting the 
present and reveahng the future, rather than as 
authorized exponents of the past that our great 
teachers have taught us. Westcott and Hort were 
such — teachers to whom the Church has not vet 
listened, men to whose vision we have not opened our 
^yes. " That which hath been is and ever will be. 
If the Presence of Christ seem in some sense to be taken 
from us in these later days, the apparent removal 
caUs out a blessing never before given. Each move- 
ment, each semblance, of separation becomes for 
believers the revelation of Divine Majesty. The words 
written of the first disciples will be found true of every 
disciple in every age : He led them out until they were 
over against Bethany — out of the sacred precincts which 
enclosed all that they held most sacred, past the scene 
of the Agony and the scene of the Weeping — and He 
lifted up His hands and blessed them. And it came to 
pass while He blessed them, He parted from them, and 
was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped Him 
,and returned to Jerusalem — returned, having lost the 
Lord from their sight that they might have Him for 
ever — with great joy ; and were continually in the 
Temple, blessing God." ^ So Bishop Westcott ex- 
pressed his own faith in the Risen Lord : " We requke," 
he said, '* to be taken up out of our little circle of 
.strifes and questionings, as it were, into the mountain, 

1 Westcott, Revelation of the Risen Lord, pp. 183, 184 ; and 
passim. 



THE WAY 109 

that so we may regard our King in His glory, as He 
has there revealed Himself. It is not by narrowing 
our vision or our sympathy, by fixing our eyes on that 
which is congenial to our feelings, by excluding from 
our interest whole regions of Christendom, that v/e 
can gain the repose of faith. We must dare to look 
on the broad and chequered aspect of life." ^ 

Dr. Hort too writes of Christ as the Way.^ ''As 
He who had been leading a chosen few along a way 
which He shared with them revealed HimseK in that 
hour as the one universal Way, so the same revelation, 
when understood and embraced in its full breadth, 
delivers His Church from helpless dependence on any 
partial tokens or recognitions of His guidance. It 
beckons onward not to some laxer and feebler form of 
allegiance to Him as safer and more lasting ; but to 
a faith in Him, and in the treasures hidden in Him, 
both deeper and wider in itself, and more complete 
in its mastery over our whole nature, than any to 
which we have yet attained. It is not ill but well for 
the Church that some temporal and external character- 
istics which marked the time of probation and appren- 
ticeship should vanish, even though we can scarcely 
distinguish their loss from the loss of Him to whom 
for long centuries they have borne witness. If He 
takes away any familiar signs of His presence, it is 
because they are becoming hindrances to the ripening 
of discipleship. New knowledge of Him has to be 
learned : new works for Him have to be undertaken. 
It is His own voice which bids us ' arise and go hence, '^ 
that we may find Him and follow Him elsewhere." 

The words of the prophets are useless unless we la5r 

^ Westcott, Revelation of the Risen Lord, pp. 162, 163. 
* Hort, The Way, the Truth, the Life, pp. 33, 34, 



no WHERE IS CHRIST? 

them to our hearts. God grant that we may take 
time to meditate on such words as these just quoted. 

" We do therefore solemnly enjoin upon pastors 
and preachers that their first duty is to retire periodi- 
cally within the veil, and walk with God, in order to 
come forth and proclaim His clear revelation of Him- 
self made through the ages ; and to re-affirm in this 
our day of distress that He understands and rules the 
race which He shaped with His own Hand, and with 
which He irrevocably identified Himself when He 
became the Son of Man " (Pastoral letter of the Ameri- 
can Bishops, General Convention, 1916). 

To attempt here to map out the way would be to 
stultify the argument of this book. The whole point 
is that we none of us know, but that we can know as 
we go if we unite in Him. But since the Way is He, 
and we all know something of Him, we can outhne 
some of the features ; and that we have been trying 
to do in these few pages. 

Do we still feel that the programme is too vague ? 
So too is that of lovers at their marriage, if mutual 
trust is vagueness : if their dispensing with detailed 
drafts of future action is vagueness.^ If we at once 
repudiate the charge as levelled against any such 
true lovers, we may, with equal vigour repudiate it as 
levelled against that other Married Couple, Christ and 
the Church. Indeed, all who know anything about 
love and faith know that these involve a " setting out, 
not knowing whither they are going." 

I loved to choose and see my path, but now 

Lead Thou me on. 
I do not ask to see 
The distant scene ; one step enough for me. 

And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude. 



THE WAY III 

and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of 
mighty thunders, saying. Hallelujah : for the Lord 
our God, the Almighty, reigneth. Let us rejoice and 
be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory unto Him : 
for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife 
hath made herself ready. 

Blessed are they which are bidden to the marriage 
supper of the Lamb. 



112 WHERE IS CHRIST? 



POSTSCRIPT 

THE whole point of the foregoing pages lies in 
action, here and now. The actions required 
of me as a priest are actions of repentance : in view of 
the condition of the Church and of the world to-day, 
such actions alone can be actions of hope. I have 
said that we cannot lay down a detailed programme for 
the future of the Church, for that is her Lord's con- 
cern. But it is essential for each of us to lay down a 
definite programme for himself, that we may come 
into hne with Him. " The transition, I fear, will not 
be without much pain," said Archbishop Temple (see 
above, chap. VI, p. 71) ; but our repentance will be 
worthless without that pain. We have to put into 
practice our new vision of God : knowing that to quarrel 
is to put Christ from us, to love is His embrace. Christ 
is not divided. If I am living, or teaching, or wor- 
shipping in separation from fellow-Christians, in the 
ending of that separation Hes my way of repentance 
and of hope. 



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